Institutional and Systemic Racism 1.

Posted on October 11, 2022 by jsh54

Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998) was born in Trinidad. His parents migrated to New York in 1943; Carmichael joined them in 1952. A stellar student, he graduated from the Bronx High School of Science (1960), then Howard University (Philosophy,1964). He decided against grad school at Harvard because these were the early days of the “Civil Rights Era.” Already “engage” during high school, Carmichael he became a “Freedom Rider” during his freshman year at Howard. After graduation he became an organizer in Mississippi for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating committee (SNCC); then went to the Democratic Convention as part of the alternative slate of delegates prepared by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Convention seated the “official” whites-only delegation. That rebuff vexed Carmichael.

In 1965, Carmichael went to Alabama and started work that took him in a different direction from that of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). His divergence from the mainstream continued in 1966 during work in Mississippi. Along the way, Carmichael became chairman of SNCC. He began to expound on the idea of “Black Power.” By this he meant “a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” Carmichael supported the expulsion of whites from SNCC. At the same time, he encouraged white organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to oppose the draft and the Vietnam War. In May 1967, Carmichael resigned as SNCC chairman, seemingly half jumping and half being pushed by restive members.

Carmichael then joined with Charles V. Hamilton to write Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967). Hamilton (1929–) was born in Muskogeee, OK, moved to Chicago in 1935 as part of the “Great Migration,” got a BA from Roosevelt University, then an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Wanting to be an activist professor, not an academic professor, he got fired from a series of jobs, he was at Roosevelt University when they co-wrote the book.

Part memoir and part theoretical piece (seemingly much influenced by Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961 )), Black Power is also an artifact of its times. Reviewing the fight for Black political rights in the South, the book finds that gaining such rights in a majoritarian democracy didn’t get much for a minority. Carmichael and Hamilton began to see Blacks as suffering from many forms of oppression, rather than only disfranchisement. Hamilton told Studs Terkel that “The point we are trying to make in this book is that one’s individual stance in relationship to the black man is irrelevant. It’s what the system does and that’s why we use the term ‘institutional racism’.”[1] In short, “white supremacy” was/is a many-headed Hydra. Worse still, many “allies”—labor unions, white liberals, etc.—have their own and different primary concerns.[2] So Blacks have an even bigger fight than they imagined and they’re on their own.

The book is often cited as the source of the terms “institutional racism” and “systemic racism.” Like many other current ideas, it springs from an earlier time than our own.

[1] See: Studs Terkel interviews Professor Charles V. Hamilton on his book written with Stokely Carmichael entitled “Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America” ; part 1 | The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive | A Living Celebration

[2] Thus the successive (not accumulating) progressive yard-signs in my neighborhood went from “Hate Has No Home Here” to “Black Lives Matter” to Shapiro/Wild/Fetterman.

The New Credentials.

Posted on October 6, 2022 by jsh54

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in search of a good job, must be in want of a BA.”[1] Partly this belief sprang from the rise of new industries after the Second World War, ones which assigned a premium to communication and analytical skills. Partly this belief sprang from the propaganda of the too-many colleges left standing after the Baby Boom passed through. Partly this belief sprang from the decision of many companies to enhance profits by spinning-off training to post-secondary education.[2]

Now the tide may be starting to run in the opposite direction.[3] For one thing, most jobs never required a college degree and no one could pretend that they should.[4] Two-thirds of American adults don’t have a BA. For another thing, after state governments cut support for higher education during the “Great Recession,” colleges had to raise their tuition. Students and their parents took on much more debt.[5] Now that is being recognized as unsustainable, even if the Biden administration’s debt cancellation is problematic. For yet another thing, the Covid pandemic triggered a labor shortage from which the country has not yet emerged. For yet another other thing, we live an “era of racial reckoning,” even if it isn’t clear how long that era will last. Requiring a BA for a job will tend to disproportionately exclude Black (76 percent) and Hispanic (83 percent) adults.[6]

What to put in place of the BA, both immediately and over the long-term? One answer is a variant on the “accelerated degree completion” programs that flourished for a while among hard-pressed colleges. Those programs started from the assumption that working adults had accumulated much applicable knowledge through experience. All they really needed were some classes in what amounted to the theoretical constructs for making sense of that knowledge. Now, a variety of organizations are pushing the idea of directly assessing the skills of workers without bothering about completing the BA.[7] (Even this isn’t entirely new. Look at the Army discharge papers of World War II GIs.[8]) Facilitative language is being coined: people are “skilled through alternative routes” and they have been held back by the “paper ceiling.”

So some businesses are starting to cut back on their previous requirement of the BA.[9] This will likely create opportunities for some credentialing industry other than colleges.

[1] Well, Jane Austen WOULD have said this if she had lived two hundred years later. From 2010 to 2019, the percentage of people age 25 and older with a BA or higher rose from 29.9 to 36.0 percent (i.e. 20 percent).

[2] Just my reading of developments. I don’t have sources to cite. Decide for yourself if it makes sense. Still, how is it different from spinning-off pensions to 401(k)s?

[3] Steve Lohr, “Seeing Promise, and a Model to Copy, in Job-Training Programs,” NYT, 3 October 2022.

[4] Just try to say “Roofing 101” without laughing. Although what I need right now is somebody who has passed “Roofing 501: Terracotta Tile Roofs.”

[5] See: College costs: the old eat the young. | waroftheworldblog

[6] In 2019, among those aged 25 and older, 58.1 percent of Asians; 40.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites; 26.1 percent of Blacks; and 18.8 percent of Hispanics had a bachelor’s degree or higher. U.S. Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data

[7] According to one study, up to 30 million current workers have the skills needed to do higher level jobs than they presently hold. Those jobs pay on average 70 percent more than their present job.

[8] Still, see The Pacific part 10 Eugene Sledge – YouTube

[9] Among them are reported to be Chevron, Google, IBM, Walmart, and LinkedIn.

The Ukraine Missile Crisis.

Posted on October 5, 2022 by jsh54

As you age, anniversaries (birthdays, weddings) turn from fun to scary.[1] In October 1962, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union had begun to place medium-range missiles equipped with nuclear warheads in Cuba. This marked a dangerous turn in the Cold War. If the Americans caught you doing it, they were likely to “blow your head clean off.” The Cuban Missile Crisis followed. Now, sixty years on, Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin has begun threatening to use nuclear weapons as his war of bad choice against Ukraine goes south.

In the view of Walter Russell Mead, Mr. Putin isn’t that hard to understand because he keeps explaining himself.[2] Putin sees an “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony that has long dominated the rest of the world and which continues to do so today.[3] Given centuries of unavailing grievances, criticisms, and the use of armed force by everyone from Napoleon to Osama bin Laden, there’s probably something to the idea of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Many people around the world, including those within the walls the hegemonic powers, share some version of Putin’s critique.[4] China’s Zi Jinping may well be among the believers, even if he has a somewhat different plan than does Putin. In any event, Putin sees Russia as the champion of the vast majority of the world. He has hoped to turn Russia into the leader of a global coalition that could hold the Anglo-Saxons in check.

Part of Putin’s effort at Russian revival has been a sustained effort to reassemble much of the old Soviet Union. Belarus is a puppet state; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expresses—among other, competing forces—a Russian determination to build tight links with the Central Asian “stans” that one belonged to Russia; and Putin has repeatedly tried to curtail Ukraine’s independence. Another part has been his effort to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) through energy policy and meddling in the domestic affairs of European countries.

For Putin, the war in Ukraine is going badly, but he could be interpreting the larger context of international relations as tilting in favor of Russia. Global economic conditions are imposing widespread suffering. Such suffering often produces political strains, conflict, instability, and second thoughts.[5] Threatening the use of nuclear weapons could intensify discord in the West. Still, if Putin was playing a long game then he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in the first place.

Like Lenin and Hitler, Putin seems to feel a special personal urgency. He may be “walking with Destiny” toward his vision of the Future, but he has to try to bring it into being in his own lifetime. Observers might consider the possibility that he is determined to rush events to a conclusion without any regard for the consequences of failure.

The issue may not be the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. It may be the use of the full array against the Anglo-Saxons. I’d be happy to be wrong.

[1] For my Mom’s birthday one year, my Dad had a jeweler make a heart-shaped locket surrounded by filigree out of white gold. Inside was a photograph of their lost daughter. Still makes me feel very inadequate.

[2] Walter Russell Mead, “Putin’s Nuclear Threat Is Real,” WSJ, 4 October 2022.

[3] Although France has joined the resistance to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Putin’s critique of the Anglo-Saxons resembles that of Charles de Gaulle.

[4] See the litany of carping op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

[5] To illustrate the availability bias, look at Liz Truss.

High Noon.

Posted on October 5, 2022 by jsh54

There are a bunch of movies around about deadly men who have abandoned their previous lives to search for quiet, normality. Then something happens. Generally, it is some grave offense against innocents by super-predators. The normal forces of Order prove impotent. The Sleeper Awakens.[1] “And Hell followed with him.”[2] If I wanted to go all “cosmic,” I could argue—with a more or less straight face—that these movies are artifacts of the psychology of our time. On the one hand, they’re instruments of vicarious “machismo” in an age when masculinity is often derided as “toxic.”[3] On the other hand, they reflect the celebration of the prowess and heroism of America’s elite Special Forces troops during the “Forever Wars.”[4]

Basically, they are old wine in new bottles. The old wine is, first, the idea of Righteous Violence. Violence is terrible in its nature, but it may be the only way for Justice to triumph.[5] Second, there is the idea of a society that can’t—or won’t—defend itself from danger. These ideas come together in the basic story of the Second World War. The bad guys over-estimated their strength, they kept bothering people who just wanted to be left alone, and they got destroyed.[6]

The new bottles are a very high kill-count, and the belief in powerful, occult forces that refuse to play by any civilized rules. The high kill-count springs from lots of automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices combined with a theatrical athleticism.[7] The occult forces are no longer either International Communism or the Mafia. Now the occult forces are either Latin American drug cartels or Russian organized crime. In either case, the villains are extreme in their savagery and, as a by-product, filthy rich.[8]

The Ur-story for this cultural theme is the Western “High Noon” (dir. Fred Zinneman, 1952). Will Kane is a frontier marshal, once a “town-taming” killer who lived with the town’s madam. Now he’s got a Quaker wife and plans for a peaceful life elsewhere. Then he learns that an old enemy has been released from prison and is coming after him. His one-time friends abandon him out of fear; his new wife insists on flight; he’ll have to face his enemy alone.

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” He does, then throws his badge in the dirt.

[1] “Home Front” (dir. Gary Fleder, 2013); “John Wick” (dir. Chad Stahelski, 2014); “The Equalizer” (dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2014); and “Nobody” (dir. Ilya Naishuller, 2021). Also the various sequels.

[2] Revelation 6:8.

[3] See: Tyler Durden’s soliloquies in “Fight Club” (dir. David Fincher, 1999). The character of Walter White in “Breaking Bad” (2008-2013) seems inspired by a similar insight.

[4] See: “Clear and Present Danger” (dir. Philip Noyce, 1994); “Tears of the Sun”’ (dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2003); “Zero Dark Thirty” (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2013); “Lone Survivor,” (dir. Peter Berg, 2014); “American Sniper” (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014). Compare these with “Restrepo” (dir. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010); and “The Outpost” (dir. Rod Lurie, 2020). Also, “The Spear,” a podcast from the Modern War Institute at USMA, makes it very clear that American soldiers in combat rely heavily upon indirect fires and close air support. See: https://mwi.usma.edu/category/podcasts/the-spear/

[5] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory

[6] Literally. See, or listen to, Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia (2021).

[7] At the root of this athleticism lies “The Transporter” (dir. Corey Yuen—but really Luc Besson, 2002); “Ong-Bak” (dir. Prachya Pinkaew, 2003); and “District B-13” (dir. Pierre Morel—but really Luc Besson, 2004). “The Transporter” made good use of the former UK Olympic Team diver Jason Statham.

[8] See, for examples of the Russians, “Eastern Promises” (dir. David Cronenberg, 2007), and the Ukrainian character Sergei Malatov in “The Wire,” Season Two et seq.

It Takes a Village in Pakistan.

Posted on October 4, 2022 by jsh54

The countryside of Pakistan’s southeastern province of Sindh is dotted with little villages. Walking into one of them, a historically-conscious American traveler could think that s/he is traveling back in time. Several score families live in each village. The houses are walled with mud brick and roofed with thatch. There are few cattle. Water comes from village hand-pumps, often very old. There are no paved roads.

The villagers live from farming of a very traditional kind. There are two crops a year: wheat planted in the late Fall and harvested in the Spring; and cotton planted in the late spring and harvested in the Fall. The wheat crop feeds the family for a year; the cotton pays for everything else. From early in life, the children help with the work.

The country’s farm system has existed for centuries, long before Pakistan either lost or regained its independence. It looks a lot like post-Civil War sharecropping in the American South. Landlords own vast tracts of farmland. In 2013, an NGO reported that almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Pakistan’s farmland belonged to just 5 percent of the population. In contrast, just over half of the rural population owns no land whatsoever.[1] Well, not many American autoworkers own a car plant. The answer to such a smart-alec remark comes in the nature of the land tenure system and the farming methods employed.

The actual farm work is done by tenants on small plots of land. The landlord loans the tenant the money to buy seed and fertilizer. The tenant plants, raises, harvests, and sells the crop. The landlord gets most of the harvest. Much of that is sold for export. Out of the meager share that the tenant receives, he pays part of it to the landlord for the loan.[2]

When the harvest is good, villagers can afford the debt payment and more. They buy motorbikes, televisions, and refrigerators in addition to the basic requirements of vegetables and medicines. When the harvest is bad, the tenant can’t repay the debt. It gets carried over by the landlord. Over the past few years, harvests have varied to an unusual degree.

The tenants are stuck in the debt system, but their children are not. Growing numbers have departed for cities. They hope to find other kinds of work. The departures alarm the landlords, who are accustomed to having a ready supply.

Cultural representations of this world don’t often make it to Western audiences. The movie “The Home and the World” (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1984) is set in Bengal and is about something else, but it offers glimpses of a ruthless land-manager and his thugs. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008) again is about India, but it leads off with a vivid description of the many abuses heaped on tenant farmers and landless laborers by the landlords.[3] One of the story arcs in the British television series “Traffik” (1989) follows a Pakistani farmer who can only survive by planting opium poppies.

“Reading by analogy” (HA, eez pun, yes?), one could read William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940) or James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

[1] See: Give Me Land, Lots Of Land: Only 5% Of Pakistanis Own Two-Thirds of Farmlands; One-Half Of Farmers Are Landless (ibtimes.com)

[2] Christina Goldbaum and Zia ur-Rehman, “Floods Aggravate the Plight of Pakistan’s Farmworkers,” NYT, 2 October 2022.

[3] The movie version (dir. Rahmin Barani, 2021) blows by this part of the book.

My Weekly Reader 3 October 2022.

Posted on October 4, 2022 by jsh54

“News” is a commodity like any other. There is a market for it, and the market is segmented by both price and consumer preference. In the case of “news,” the term “price” bears two meanings. On the one hand, there is the monetary cost. On the other hand, there is the intellectual effort required to read and make sense of the “news.” Thus, complexity is in itself a high price to pay.[1] Simplicity makes for a mass market. Historians of media have long understood that the early press of the Nineteenth Century aimed to be an elite press by sermonizing at length a small, well-off, highly-literate audience of “serious” people. In contrast, the emergence of a mass press later in the century surfed the waves of sports, crime, scandal, and sex. Reporters loved the combinations of these topics that drew broad readership.

The Reverend Edward W. Hall (1881-1922) married Frances Noel Stevens (1874-1942) in 1911. She was a horse-faced battle-axe seven years his senior, but her family had money and respectability. What more could an ambitious young Episcopalian priest desire? By 1920, he was a priest at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The “What more” sprang up before his eyes at choir practice in the form of Eleanor Mills.

Eleanor Mills (1888-1922) was the wife of Jim Mills (1878–1965), the sexton[2] of the church. The couple had married in 1905, had a daughter and a son (born in 1906 and 1910 respectively) and they lived in a two-decker across the street from the church. By 1920, Eleanor had a lot of time on her hands: both children were in school and her husband was the janitor at a local elementary school. She began singing in the church choir. Not all of the photos of the time capture it, but Eleanor was a knock-out. Her looks floored Ed Hall.

The two began a secret affair. They exchanged passionate letters. They found a “lovers’ lane” outside New Brunswick. It went on for two years. It must have become apparent that it could not have a happy ending. It isn’t hard to imagine the headlines in the New York Daily News, one of the “new” mass-circulation papers: “Episcopal Priest Dumps His Wife and Absconds with Wife of Another!” Still, they kept on meeting and corresponding in secret.

Jim Mills found out. Perhaps he found the love letters from Hall. He confronted his wife with her infidelity. She responded with insults, rather than remorse. Jim Mills may have taken his discovery to Mrs. Hall. On 14 September 1922, Hall and Mills drove to the lovers’ lane in Somerset, NJ. The next day, a passerby found them dead. They were lying on the ground, fully-dressed and artfully arranged. Their love letters, rather than those of just one of them, were strewn about. Reverend Hall had been shot once in the head. Mrs. Mills had been much worse handled: shot three times in the head, her throat cut, and her tongue cut out. It looks like the killer was madder at Mills than at Hall. But would that be Jim Mills or Mrs. Hall?

The police couldn’t (or wouldn’t[3]) solve the case. In 1926, Mrs. Hall and her brothers were tried and acquitted. The mass market papers had a field day with it. It’s a “cold case” still, but journalists keep writing books about it.[4] And readers keep snapping them up.

[1] Perhaps because it is costly to produce thought in defiance of Ockham’s Razor. Same goes for higher education.

[2] A sexton is basically the groundskeeper, but also—cue the spine-tingling—digs the graves.

[3] Somebody went a little crazy and killed a couple of hypocritical, unrepentant adulterers.

[4] Joe Pompeo, Blood and Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (2022), reviewed by Tom Nolan, WSJ, 30 September 2022—something else artfully arranged.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Posted on September 30, 2022 by jsh54

Modern history (1500–) instructs us to think of the Nation-State as the natural form of political community. That isn’t true. Once upon a time there were supra-national communities like the Medieval and Early Modern Empires. To take one example, the Russian Empire (and the Soviet Union) once encompassed European Russia and Siberia, Ukraine, Belarus, eastern Poland, and the Baltic states, but also the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Such empires disintegrated during the Twentieth Century.

In their place arose the idea of supra-national communities. The post-1945 development of European integration has set an example for others seeking strength in a supra-national group. European integration advanced from the 6-nation European Coal and Steel Community of 1948 to the 27-nation political and economic union of today. No one has yet found the path to an equivalent unity. It hasn’t stopped countries from pursing joint action.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is one such effort. In 1989 the collapse of the Soviet Union, marked by the secession of many parts of the Soviet empire, created a potential vacuum of power in Central Asia. In 1992, Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan signed a Collective Security Treaty. In 1993, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia joined. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was born in the nadir of Russian power.

Competition between Russia and China for dominance in the region raised the real possibility of future wars. In 1996, as a safeguard against this danger, Russia and China, with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan dragged along, formed the “Shanghai Five” group. Its first achievement came in a “Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions” (1996), followed by a “Treaty on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions” (2017). In 2000, the Five agreed “oppose intervention in other countries’ internal affairs on the pretexts of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘protecting human rights’.”[1] In 2001, Uzbekistan joined and the group became the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization.”

After 2001, the reckless American foreign policy[2] set off alarm bells in the region. This might be thought of as the “push” influence on decisions. Since 2013, China’s “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative has aggressively extended its presence through much of Central and South Asia. This might be thought of as the “pull” influence on decisions. India and Pakistan both joined in 2017; Belarus, Iran, and Turkey plan to join in the near future.[3] It is an alliance of those discontented with the American-led international order.

Can an organization of authoritarian states with disparate interests build something real?

[1] Probably inspired by American and European intervention in the Bosnian Civil War (1992-1995).

[2] The failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, followed by the decision to remain in and to transform Afghanistan; the attack on Iraq and the botched occupation, leading to civil war and Kurdish separatism; the overthrow of Libya’s dictator, followed by the abandonment of the country to civil war; and the support for the dissidents in Middle Eastern societies during the failed “Arab Spring” movements, including pressing for the overthrow of the Egyptian dictator Mubarak. So, yes, “reckless.” Or wanton. Or dough-headed.

[3] India purchases 60 percent of its military arms from Russia and has an on-going border dispute with China; Belarus is a Russian client-state; Iran is at odds with the United States and sells much of its oil to China; Pakistan has security interests in Afghanistan, a hostile relationship with India, and a deep involvement in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”; Turkey has been at odds with the EU and the United States for a long time.

Democracy and Authoritarianism 2.

Posted on September 29, 2022 by jsh54

How do Democracy and Authoritarianism compare in addressing long-term and major problems? Climate change offers itself as one example, crowding to the front, waving its arms, and going “Me, me, call on me!”

American solipsism might lead people to think that Authoritarianism beats Democracy like a carpet during Spring cleaning. As one reporter for the New York Times phrased it in July 2022, “the United States’ climate plans collapse[ed] under the opposition of a senator who represents one half of one percent of the population.”[1] In fact, other democracies have been very aggressive in adopting policies to fight (or just adapt to) climate change.

On the other side, China has announced “one dramatic climate policy after another.” In the theory of Innocents Abroad, it can seem that policy is formulated “without the fuss of legislative horse-trading or infighting.” Really? China’s government is very much a black box, so it is difficult to tell what goes on inside the government. The history of the Chinese Communist Party is full of factional disputes over issues of revolutionary theory, but also of substantive policy decisions.[2] Why would it be different now? Just because you don’t see the horse-trading or infighting, doesn’t mean that none takes place.

Another problem arises with the considerable difficulty in implementing those policies. Beijing doesn’t often lay down the law to provincial leaders. They seem to have learned their lesson about central planning when carried to an extreme.[3] Instead, they offer guidance documents or aspirational goals.[4] Local officials have to figure out what the guidance means and how to achieve the goals, especially when goals conflict. On the one hand, China needs economic growth, so China needs electricity. On the other hand, Zi Jinping has committed China to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Green technologies aren’t in a position to step in right this instant to power machinery and light cities. What to do? No sooner was the ink dry on the Paris Climate Accord than state-owned enterprises and provincial governments forged ahead with the long-standing policy of building coal-fired power plants.[5] Now Beijing’s pursuit of “zero Covid” have led to years of rolling regional lock-downs that have battered the economy.

The American climate legislation blocked by “a senator who represents one half of one percent of the population” was President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill (BBB).[6] That bill included $555 billion for clean energy and climate change provisions. In August 2022, the “a senator” agreed to a bill that dropped many provisions of BBB, but included $391 billion in spending on energy and climate change. Leaders of environmental groups lauded the bill as “historic” and “transformative.”

So, if you’re not writing for a 5:00 PM dead-line, maybe democracy still works.

[1] Max Fisher, “Are Democracies Better or Worse at Handling Big Crises?” NYT, 27 July 2022. Pedantically, the plan “collapsed” under the opposition from 51 senators representing 44 percent of the population.

[2] Sure, the losers get sent to a rice paddy until the wheel turns. I can just see Progressive Democrats slobbering over “Joe Manchin, rice paddy” like Homer Simpson over donuts.

[3] See, for example, the “Great Leap Forward.” That caused any number of real crises for China. Somewhere between 15 and 55 million people died. Great Leap Forward – Wikipedia

[4] I once saw a yard sign in Cambridge, MA that read “You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms.”

[5] Other examples include the failed attempt to reduce steel production and the failed effort to reduce water pollution.

[6] Lot of Bs there. At least he’s not Bill Biden.

Democracy and Authoritarianism 1.

Posted on September 29, 2022 by jsh54

“Does democracy or an authoritarian system perform better in times of crisis?”[1] There is no question that democracy is to be preferred to authoritarianism under normal circumstances. Just ask the Uighurs or the Ukrainians.

Is democracy superior to authoritarianism in all circumstances? This is a question with its own history. The Depression of the Thirties tested democracy and found it wanting. Many political systems fractured under the immense stress of the human suffering caused by economic disaster. Democracies collapsed where they had weak roots. Where democracy survived, it did so by expanding the role of government in insuring the general welfare.[2] In the authoritarian states like Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, either the economic crisis never occurred or the country emerged from it much more swiftly than did the democracies. There followed another great crisis, the Second World War. Here, the authoritarian states again out-performed the democracies by miles—until they didn’t.[3] Since 1945, democracies have bult an economic and political model that has out-performed authoritarian governments hands-down. Witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-Mao tossing overboard of old thought.

Contemporary discussions of the question get muddled. For one thing, they can wander off course into long-term comparisons that take the question of the superiority of Democracy versus Authoritarianism seriously. Aside from the rulers, who would willingly live in an authoritarian state? Still, some political scientists have argued that authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states can suppress short-term thinking and democratic friction to impose better economic policies. Others have argued that the two systems perform roughly the same over-all.

To take another, more apposite example, climate change is not a “crisis.” A “crisis” is a time-sensitive moment of decision and action.[4] Climate change is a grave long-term problem. The first several years of the coronavirus pandemic were a real crisis: individuals and governments had to act right now to avoid a potential re-run of the Black Death.

If you take measures like excess deaths, then democratic and authoritarian states seem to have done approximately equally well at responding to the pandemic. This reflects the un-even performance of countries within the category of both democracies and authoritarian states.

If you take other measures, like economic performance, then democracies greatly out-performed the very model of a modern authoritarian state, China. Zi Jinping’s reliance on lock-downs instead of effective vaccination contributed to the current “cratering” of the Chinese economy.[5] This further discredits the “Asian model,” already brought into question by the financial crisis of 1997.[6]

In any event, this isn’t a discussion that could be held in China or Iran.

[1] Max Fisher, “Are Democracies Better or Worse at Handling Big Crises?” NYT, 27 July 2022.

[2] This was true in both the United States of the New Deal and in Conservative-governed Britain. Expanding government had the unintended effect of expanding the authority of un-elected civil servants.

[3] See the classic exposition in Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939-1945 (1968). “Nothing concentrates the mind so well as the prospect of being hanged”–Roughly from Doctor Johnson. .

[4] See: Crisis – Wikipedia The term is often abused in journalism. See: Rudiger Graf and Konrad Jarausch, Graf jarausch crisis en 2017 – „Crisis” in Contemporary History and Historiography (docupedia.de)

[5] Fisher, “Are Democracies Better or Worse,” NYT, 27 July 2022.

[6] See: East Asian model – Wikipedia

Anti-Semitism and American foreign policy.

Posted on September 28, 2022 by jsh54

By the end of the 19^th Century, huge numbers of Jews wanted to emigrate from Eastern Europe. Zionism—the belief in creating a Jewish nation-state in Palestine–arose as one possible destination. However, Palestine belonged to the Ottoman Empire, which opposed European immigration to its territory. As a much-to-be-preferred alternative among the emigrants, 4 million of them came to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Then, the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War. In a moment of desperation, Britain announced its support for the creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.[1]

In 1922, two leading Republican foreign policy experts, Henry Cabot Lodge and Hamilton Fish, sponsored a Congressional resolution supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Walter Russell Mead sees this resolution as “launching a tradition of official American support for Zionist aspirations in Palestine that a long line of presidents from both parties have continued.”[2] However, Lodge strongly opposed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. He helped write the immigration law of 1917 that began the restricting of immigration. That process peaked in the Immigration Act of 1924, which cut Jewish immigration by 90 percent.[3]

In the Thirties, Arab nationalist resistance to European immigration, which turned violent just as Britain tried to deal with the prospect of wars with Germany, Italy, and Japan, led Britain to slam the brakes on most further immigration.

In the wake of the Holocaust, In June 1945, the Jewish Agency in Palestine asked the British government to admit 100,000 Jews in European refugee camps to Palestine. Sensitive to the hostile Arab response, the British declined. In August 1945, after a brief survey of the camps by an American delegation, President Harry Truman asked the British to admit 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine. Again the British resisted. Truman could have passed the issue to the newly-established successor to the League of Nations, the United Nations. He did not. He pressed for creation of an Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. The commission worked in the shadows of the prospective negotiations over an American loan to a bankrupt Britain.[4] It should surprise no one that Truman used the commission’s report to successfully pressure the British to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine.

After the war, most Americans remained deeply opposed to increased immigration. In December 1945, Truman used a Presidential directive to by-pass Congress: Displaced Persons were accorded priority within the existing quota system. As a result, 35,000-40,000 Jewish refugees were admitted by mid-1948. Only after Israel was established and recognized by the United States, did a series of Displaced Persons Acts (1948, 1950, 1953) allow some 600,000 refugees into the country. Of the almost 400,000 admitted by 1952, only 16 percent were Jewish (i.e. about 60,000). In the same period Israel took in over 600,000 people.[5]

It is possible that early American support for Israel sprang from ugly anti-Semitism.

[1] Known as the “[Sir Arthur] Balfour Declaration” after the British Foreign Secretary who announced the policy.

[2] Walter Russell Mead, “A Century of U.S.-Israel Ties,” WSJ, 6 September 2022.

[3] See: Immigration Act of 1924 – Wikipedia

[4] See: Anglo-American loan – Wikipedia

[5] 100 years of Aliyah (Immigration) to Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel, between 1919 and 2020 – Aliyah – Wikipedia