Welcome to Lubyanka!

Another case of penal systems illuminating their culture.

Most of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle is a desultory slog, at least if you have already read the Gulag Archipelago. But there are a few glorious set-pieces. One is the mock trial of Prince Igor of Kiev that the prisoners stage in their free time, a bitter satire of the Soviet judicial system. The second is a meticulous description of how prisoners are brought into and introduced to the Lubyanka prison- the central prison of the KGB/FSB/Cheka/GPU/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB, etc.. the frequently renamed, but never-changing organ of the Russian government.

The character is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat who has recently had second thoughts about the rightness of the Soviet system, and has placed a call (around which the book's plot, such as it is, mostly revolves) to the Americans to prevent Russia from obtaining certain critical atomic secrets. Solzhenitsyn carefully prepares the way by portraying Volodin's rarified position and luxurious life. As was customary, Volodin is lured into his arrest under false pretenses, and finds himself driven to the prison almost before he knows what has happened. Then, with almost loving detail, Solzhenitsyn describes the not just systematic, but virtuosic process of degradation, step by step, shred by shred, of Volodin's humanity, as he is inducted into Lubyanka.

One cardinal rule is that prisoners must have no contact with other prisoners. Even to see others is forbidden. As they are conducted from one cell to the next, they are shoved into mini phone-booth cells if another prisoner is being conducted in the opposite direction. Their possessions are gradually taken away, down to buttons, belts, and steel shoe shanks. They are shorn. They are sleep deprived. They are relentlessly illuminated by glaring bulbs. They are spied on constantly. They are moved relentlessly from place to place and disoriented. In the middle of the night, the building is abuzz with activity, as though this were the very nerve center of the Soviet empire. 

While the rest of Russian society is mired, or cowed, in mediocrity, this is a shining point of competence. The purest expression of its obsessive leader, and the product of decades of careful study and accumulated wisdom. It is also a deeper expression of the nature of Russian society- its reflexive despotism and its strange infatuation with suffering. The closest thing we have is mafia culture, with its honor codes, brutality, and constant battle for dominance. Chess, the emblematic game of Russia, expresses this view of life as a pitiless contest to crush one's opponent. There may be a lot of historical reasons for this nature, such as the long centuries of Mongol rule, the many invasions, both ancient and modern, and the perceived success of leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but it is a deep and disturbing aspect of the Russian psyche. 

Should we have expected anything else, in the long road of declining relations after the cold war? Should the Russian people give thanks to the ruthlessness of their national leadership and psyche for the current position of relative power they wield in the world, far out of proportion to their population or economic strength? Other countries with larger populations peacefully mind their own business, avoid outside entanglements, and eschew invading their neighbors. It is the bullies, the intransigent, and the cruel, who appear to account for most of the drama in the world. Should we understand them, or fight against them?

• Another way to crush spirits.
• It is good to be outside.
• AI is not helping job seekers.
• On paying the devil his due.
• Why have kids anymore?

Hungary for Power

Hungary has become a one-party, authoritarian state, not a democracy.

Victor Orban recently paid a visit to Donald Trump in Florida, with glowing photos and pledges of goodwill. Republicans in the US have nurtured a deep fascination and alliance with Orban and his government, holding several CPAC conventions in Hungary, and hosting Orban and his lieutenants at US events. It is clear that they view Hungary as a shining example and template of where they could take the US. Not the shining city on a hill of Reagan's democratic and anti-authoritarian dreams, but a whole other kind of city, one that never will fall into Democratic hands again.

So it is worth looking in detail at what has happened in Hungary, to observe the ideals of our current Republicans and what is in store for the rest of us from a second Trump term. I was, incidentally, beaten to the punch of this analysis by a recent story in the Atlantic. Orban's party, Fidesz, is very similar to the GOP in its mix of business right-wingery and rural values. Its strength is handing out the red meat of traditional, anti-cosmopolitan values to the rural base, along with helpful economic subsidies. In the pivotal 2018 election, it won all the rural districts, even though the opposition bowed to the logic of re-written (winner-take-all) electoral system and tried to join into a unified party. 

Fidesz came to power originally on an anti-socialist platform, vowing to get rid of the remnant bits of the prior communist system, which had settled into the same kind of semi-kleptocratic mode as in most of the former Soviet states and its satellites. That they did, but not to bring an end to corruption, let alone authoritarianism, but rather to partake themselves instead. After coming into power, Fidesz rewrote the constitution, in ways large and small to entrench their own power, and has since continued a campaign of extremely effective, gradual, and often surreptitious legislation to cement its advantages. Gerrymandering is now standard procedure, which when combined with the winner-take-all districts creates the opportunity to win overwhelming majorities in parliament founded on very thin electoral pluralities. Small parties can not win any more, but are also prohibited from combining with other small parties into election list coalitions.

The courts were remade by putting them under the control of a political appointee- the president of the National Judicial Office. This president is appointed by parliament, and in turn appoints, promotes, and runs the operations and budget of the whole judicial system. Needless to say, it is heavily influenced by the now Fidesz-controlled parliament and executive.

The media has been remade by gradual pressure on independent media owners to sell to Fidesz-friendly interests, which now control 90% of the country's media. Government advertising buys were strategically placed with friendly outlets, and government run media was put under direct political control. A Russian inspired "security" law was passed to outlaw ill-defined criticism of the state, public morality, or "imbalance" of coverage, answerable naturally to a parliamentary-appointed body, rather than the courts. Imagine if in the second Trump administration, PBS and NPR were put under political control and given a "FOX" makeover. 

Hungary is now effectively a one-party authoritarian state with managed elections. We are not far off. To see the battle of titanic interests and billionaires now openly showering money on favored candidates, and extending their tentacles down to the school board level, is sickening. The Republican party has partnered with Heritage foundation to offer an openly Orbanist plan for the second Trump administration. The court system has already re-written our constitution in extensive ways over the last four years, without an amendment being passed, or even proposed. The antics of Judge Eileen Cannon show that very little may remain of the rule of law if it is left in the hands of partisan extremists.

And our media is in even more perilous condition, with the relentless lying of FOX, Sinclair, and their ecosystem. The Republican convention just past was a pageant of lies and grift, betokening the criminal enterprise that party has turned into. Headed by their adored, and now divine, leader who is not just a felon and business fraud, but rapist and insurrectionist as well. But no matter. With enough money, and enough shamelessness, anything is possible.

• Everything is fine!
• Scandals erupt out of a corrupted system.
• The new GOP.
• Which is a blue collar party, right?
• Tom Tomorrow, on last week.
• Historical note on the great California land grab, and the fate of "free" land generally.
• Notes from the early days of life.

Imperialism for Thee, but Not for Me

Realism, idealism, and false realism in the Ukraine war.

The Ukraine war has been a disaster. That much is certain. But who caused it, and could it have been averted with better policy from us? And what would the costs of such a policy have been? There is a large school of foreign policy "realists" (exemplified by John Mearsheimer) who think that Russia was driven to this war by the inexorable encroachment of NATO towards the Russian borders. Thus we are at fault, just as much as Russia, which is actually dropping bombs on Ukraine and cutting a blood-soaked swath through its eastern and southern regions. The imperialism of Russia over its neighbors is perfectly understandable, realistic, and OK. By this argument, Russia has been crystal clear that offering Ukraine the distant prospect of NATO membership, as we did in 2008, was a declaration of war (by us!). Russia has tried to negotiate in good faith all through this time, and kept working for peace, even as it could see its interests eroded, and the necessity of war increasing. Till at last, it was forced by our policy to take over Crimea, and ultimately, in the face of increasing infiltration by Western interests in Ukraine, launch the full scale war we see today.

While this is one perspective on the level of grand strategy and traditional balance of power views, it leaves out one of the actors in the drama, and is a curious way to apportion blame for manifest evil. The actor it leaves out is Ukraine, which might want to have some say in its own destiny. And the evil is the way in which this realist school casually consigns countries to "spheres of influence", fated to be sat upon by their neighboring bullies. Perhaps world history is one long story of bullies fighting it out over riches and territory. But does it have to be? It does not, and therein lies the difference between war and peace, blame and praise.

Realists point to America's own empire, perhaps most explicitly outlined in the Monroe Doctrine. This statement by John Quincy Adams claimed the entire Western Hemisphere to be a special zone where European meddling was unwelcome, and defended by the nascent power of the United States. This was largely aspirational at the time, and European imperialist powers continued meddling in the hemisphere nevertheless, even invading the US itself in the war of 1812. And of course, the Monroe doctrine was not intended to set up a US empire at all, but was rather an anti-imperialist document, promoting the self-determination of the countries of South and Central America. We have since certainly done our share of meddling, taking several large portions of Mexico for our own territory, corrupting various Central American countries in commercial and anti-communist quasi-empires. But on the other hand, for the most part we have had friendly and peaceful relations, even (the shambolic Bay of Pigs invasion aside) keeping our hands off of Soviet-allied Cuba.

Evolution of the Russian empire, over the centuries. Whether the areas under Russian occupation ever wanted to be there, or now wish to stay there, remains a live question.

It is clear that our view of empire is not, currently, a traditional one. We have lots of friends, lots of allies, and lots of power, of soft and hard kinds. But we have not set up a barrier of involuntary client states against regional threats. NATO is emblematic as a voluntary alliance. It was and remains a collective (if US-dominated) alliance of countries trying to deter a third world war. Such a war was first contemplated to arise from the European antagonists who had just fought the two preceding wars - Germany, France, and the UK. But as they rebuilt their societies on both an economic and moral basis, it quickly became clear that the real threat was going to come from the new Soviet Empire, which had quickly swallowed up all of Eastern Europe. 

Each of these Eastern European countries had their dreams of freedom crushed in the wake of Germany's defeat, and each was correspondingly eager to leave the Soviet Empire when the cold war, at long last, came to an end. Vladimir Putin blames Mikhail Gorbachev for loosening the reins and thoughtlessly letting the empire crumble. The current Russian state celebrates its greatest holidays around the high water mark of another leader, more the Putin's taste- Joseph Stalin, when Russian power was at its (relative) peak. Putin's idea of power is expressed in his relation with Belarus- a thoroughly cowed and pliant frontier, from which Russian conveniently launched a large portion of its invasion of Ukraine. It is typical of this curdled and "realist" perspective that the wishes of the people involved count for nothing. Their aspirations and well-being are irrelevant, the imperial state and its power are what matter. 

As an aside, Michael Kimmage has recently written a book-length analysis of Ukraine. It is a quite balanced history of the whole run-up to the war, laying out the moves, thoughtless or not, taken by both sides. Here, one gets a sense that Putin was sensing weakness in the West, in the wake of our Iraqi and Afghan debacles. But where this book really shines is in its epilogue, which is a pean to the power of history itself.

"Countries invariably conceive their foreign policies in reaction to earlier conflicts. They are led by their sense of who was wrong and who was right, of what the core problem was and what the solution to that problem was, fighting the last war until it is no longer the last war. The preoccupation with the past can be the path to wisdom, of learning from history, or it can leave countries trapped in their interpretations of the past. To investigate the origins of an ongoing war, then, is not just to chart the present moment. It is to peer, however uncertainly, into the future."

Kimmage recounts how Germany turned historical analysis on its head after World War 1 to claim that others had started it, and others were responsible for Germany's defeat, thus setting the table for a second round. Similarly, it is Putin's potted analysis of the cold war and its appalling aftermath for Russia that forms the motivation for his current war. Just like realism, this theory of the power of historical narrative serves to explain motivations and actions, and by understanding absolve the actors, to some degree, of culpabilty, making the current conflict seem inevitable. In this case, the West was doltishly uninformed and sleepwalked into an unnecessary war. 

But history is not a given. It is, in places like Russia, a product of the propaganda organs, not the science organs. It is narrated with a grievence and a point in mind, and can be, in the right hands, tailored to lead to practically anything the leader wishes to happen. The idea that we should be beholden to the historical analysis of another country or its leader, and thus be on the hook for appeasing their "legitimate" demands, feelings, etc. is absurd. However much such understanding helps us analyze what other actors have in mind, it should not bind our analysis of the same history, or of the broader functioning of the international system.

Returning to the realist perspective, it recognizes the lowest common denominator in an anarchic environment- raw power. It is the mafia approach to foreign relations. Well, we have an answer to that, which is a modern perspective, modeled in a modern state that has and uses overwhelming policing power against aggressors. It is enlightenment values that have suffused Europe, providing the peace seen on the continent among the members of NATO and the EU. We have gotten so used to living amidst civilized values that a Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed unthinkable, despite a long train of preliminary invasions, explicit policy statements from Russia, and propaganda preparation. Europe should have used its power to immediately push Russia back out of Ukraine. That would have been the ideal scenario to safeguard the values that Ukraine was aspiring to, and that the West embodies.

So, what about nuclear weapons and World War 3? Russia has been rattling its nuclear saber, resorting to any threat it can to keep Ukraine weak and friendless. Needless to say, it would not be wise of Russia to use nuclear bombs in Ukraine. Whatever grievances / justification Russia has for its invasion, even internally, would collapse immediately. I think everyone recognizes that nuclear weapons exist for mutual and existential deterrence, notionally protecting Russia (in this case) from invasion by other countries. Fine. Helping Ukraine rid itself of a cruel bully, restoring its independent and original borders, is, conversely, fully justified and is the kind of aim that lends itself to a limited war. At very least at this point, we should provide Ukraine with the wherewithal for air superiority over its own territory.

Russia exemplifies old thinking from the anarchic world order. It (and China as well) want to drag the world back into that world, recreating the glory days of Stalin's empire. Or even Catherine the Great's. It is in the power of the West, as a growing collective of democratic and prosperous countries, to deny these aims, rather than appeasing them. And the expeditious and effective use of police power in Ukraine would yield dividends into the future, strengthening the collective power of the West to foster the freedom and self-determination of other nations. Could this protective concept allow movement the other way? Sure- Hungary, for instance, might want to join the Russian orbit and leave the EU. And good riddence! They would be welcome to do so. These alignments should not be determined by war, (nor, hopefully propaganda and corruption), but by national sentiment and interest.

The primitive mafia mindset is also one that afflicts certain precincts of US politics, notably the Republican presidential candidate, who can't see beyond "strength" and machismo, and seems more likely to support Putin than NATO or Ukraine. It is another case of cavalier disregard not only of decades of collective work by the West to sustain a civilized international order, but of elementary concepts of justice and self-determination. Maintaining a just peace takes steadfastness, work and sacrifice. If we do nothing, then sure, the bullies will win and the world will go right back to one where bullies have only other bullies to be afraid of. If last week's Memorial day means anything, however, it is that collective sacrifice over the long arc of US history has always served, at least in principle, more freedom and less tyranny- for others, not just ourselves.

• Incredibly, Voyager 1 is back on track and transmitting. From 162 astronomical units (0.94 light day) from earth.
• The reason why our country is in this perilous position is ... lying liars.
• The state of corruption today.
• Alito throws wife under the bus.

Ideologies of Work

Review of Elizabeth Anderson: "Hijacked: How neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers, and how workers can take it back."

We live by the sweat of our brow, though work. At least that has been the story after we were thrown out of the garden of Eden, where we had previously foraged without effort. By the time of Puritans, work had been re-valued as being next to godliness, in what became known as the Puritan work ethic. Elizabeth Anderson takes this as her point of departure in a fascinating historical study of the winding (and mostly descending) road that attitudes toward work took down the centuries, in the perennial battle between workers and parasites who have found ways to avoid sweating, yet eat just the same ... or better.

Anderson trots through all the classical economists and philosophers, down to John Stuart Mill and Marx, showing two main threads of thought. First is the progressive thread, in which the Puritans can (curiously) be classed, as can Adam Smith. They value work as both a cultural and meaningful activity, not just a means of sustenance. They think everyone should work, and criticize anyone, high or low, who shirks this responsibility. Genteel landowners who spend their time hunting rather than improving their estates are just as culpable as drunkards and other able-bodied peasants who fail to do their share. Learning and innovation are highly valued, as not just ameliorating the lot of those making improvements, but at the same time raising the wealth of, and standard of living for, all.

In contrast is the conservative thread. Anderson herself describes it trenchantly:

"From the conservative perspective, however, poverty reflected an individual's failure to filfill the demands of the work ethic. Society is at fault solely in establishing institutions that violate natural law in promoting vice through provisions such as the Poor Law. Conservatives agreed that the Poor Law must therefore be abolished or radically reformed. If poverty is caused by the vice of the poor, the remedy for poverty must be to force the poor to practice virtue, to live up to the demands of the work ethic. Conservatives differed somewhat on which virtue was most necessary for the poor to practice. Priestly focused on frugality, Bentham on industry, Malthus on chastity, Paley on contentment (understood as the opposite of covetous envy of the rich). Thus, Priestly hoped to convert poor workers into virtuous bourgeios citizens through a legally mandated individual savings plan. Bentham favored a workfare system that turned the working poor into imprisoned debt peons of capitalist entrepreneurs. Malthus advocated leaving the poor to starvation, disease and destitution, but offered them the hope that they could rescue themselves by postponing marriage and children. Burke and Wately agreed with Malthus, but attempted to put a liberal-tory paternalist veneer on their view. ...

"The moral accounting that assigns responsibilities to individuals without regard- and even in inverse proportion- to the means they have to fulfill them remains a touchstone of conservative thought to the present day. ...

"The ideology of the conservative work ethic is distinguished by a harsh orientation toward ordinary workers and the poor, and an indulgent one toward the 'industrious' rich- those who occupy themselves with making money, either through work or investment of their assets, regardless of whether their activities actually contribute to social welfare. in practice, this orientation tends to slide into indulgence toward the rich, whether or not they are industrious even in this morally attenuated sense. ...

"Here lies a central contradiction of the conservative work ethic. All the conservatives claimed that the key to overcoming poverty was to make the poor bourgeois in attitude. All they needed to do was adopt the work ethic, or be forced to adopt it, along with the spirit of competitive emulation, the desire to better others in the race for riches and ensure that one's children not fall beneath the standard of living in which they were raised. Poverty was proof that they hadn't adopted bourgeois virtues and aspirations. This presupposed that the poor suffered from no deficit in opportunities. The path to prosperity was open; the poor were simply failing to take it. Yet we have seen that, Priestly partially excepted, conservative policies knowingly reduced the opportunities of the poor to acquire or retain property, work for themselves, or escape precarity."

My major critique of Anderson's analysis is that putting all this conflict and history into the frame of the work ethic is inappropriate and gives the work ethic far more weight than it merits. Firstly, everyone thinks of themselves as working. The most sedentary rentier doubtless thinks of his or her choosing among investments as of critical importance to the health and future of the nation. Even his or her shopping choices express taste and support a "better" sort of business, in that way performing work towards a better community. The English royals probably see themselves as doing essential cultural work, in their choice of hats and their preservation of cherished traditions. Parenting, community associations, and political agitation can all, to an expansive mind, be construed as "work". And indeed some of our greater artistic and other accomplisments come from the labors of wealthy people who were entirely self-directed rather than grubbily employed. All this implies that a work ethic can be accommodated in all sorts of ways if markets are not going to be the standard, as they hardly can be in any philosophical or moral system of a work ethic. This makes work ethics rather subjective and flexible, as Anderson implicitly demonstrates through the centuries.

However a more serious problem with Anderson's analysis is that it leaves out the ethic of power. Her presentation laments the sad misuse that the work ethic has been subjected to over the years, (by conservatives), without focusing on the reason why, which is that a whole other ethic was at work, in opposition to the work ethic. And that is the power ethic, which values domination of others and abhors work as commonly understood. Or, at best, it construes the organization of society for the benefit of a leisured upper crust as work of momentous, even civilizational, significance. Nietzsche had a field day calling us to recognize and embrace the power ethic, and not hide it under sweeter-smelling mores like the Christian or work ethics.

Anderson does helpfully discuss in passing the feudal background to the Puritan work ethic, where the Norman grandees and their progeny parcelled out the land among themselves, spent their time warring against each other (in England or in France), and lived high off the labors of their serfs/peasants. No thought was given to improvement, efficiency, or better ways to organize the system. Conservatism meant that nothing (god-willing) would change, ever. Even so, the work of politics, of war, and of religious ideology was never done, and the wealthy could easily see themselves as crucial to the maintenance of a finely-balanced cultural and economic system.

Anderson also notes that the original rationale of the gentry, if one must put it in an economic frame, was that they were responsible for military support of the king and country, and thus needed to have large estates with enough surplus in people, livestock, horses, and food to field small armies. When this rationale disappeared with the ascendence of parliament and general (at least internal) peace, they became pure rentiers, and uncomfortably subject to the critique of the Puritan work ethic, which they naturally countered with one of their own devising. And that was essentially a restatement of the power ethic, that the rich can do as they please and the poor should be driven as sheep to work for the rich. And particularly that wealth is a signifier of virtue, implying application of the work ethic, (maybe among one's forebears, and perhaps more by plunder than sweat, but ... ), or transcending it via some other virtues of nobility or class. 

But in Locke and Adam Smith's day, as today, the sharpest and most vexing point of the work ethic is not the role of the rich, but that of the poor. By this time, enclosure of lands was erasing the original version of the job guarantee- that is, access to common lands- and driving peasants to work for wages, either for landowners or industrialists. How to solve extreme poverty, which was an ever more severe corollary of capitalism and inequality? Is it acceptable to have homeless people sleeping on the streets? Should they be given work? money? social services? education? Do the poor need to be driven to work by desperation and starvation? Or is the lash of work not needed at all, and lack of wealth the only problem? Malthus was doggedly pessimistic, positing that population growth will always eat up any gains in efficiency or innovation. Thus it requires the predatory power of the gentry to enable society to accumulate anything in the way of capital or cultural goods, by squelching the poor in sufficient misery that they will not over-reproduce.

The progressive view of work and the poor took a much more sanguine view. And here one can note that much of this discussion revolves around "natural" laws. Is the population law of Malthus true? Or is the natural communitarian tendency of humans also a natural law, leading to mutual help, spontaneous community formation, and self-regulation? Are some people "naturally" superior to others? Is a hierarchical and domineering social system "natural" and necessary? Adam Smith, in Anderson's reading, took a consistently pro-worker attitude, inveighing against oppressive practices of employers, collusion of capital, and cruel goverment policies. Smith had faith that, given a fair deal and decent education, all workers would strive to the best of their abilities to better their own condition, work diligently, and thereby benefit the community as well as themselves.

For the story of Eden is fundamentally wrong. Humans have always worked, and indeed valued work. Looking outside the window at a squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder ... is to see someone working with enthusiasm and diligence. That is our natural state. The only problem was that, as human civilization progressed, power relations, and then even more- industrialization- generated work that was not only cruel and oppressive, but meaningless. The worker, forced to work for others instead of him- or herself, and routinized into a factory cog, became fully alienated from it. How to get workers to do it, nevertheless? Obviously, having a work ethic is not a full solution, unless it is of a particularly astringent and dogmatic (or tyrannical) sort. Thus the dilemma of capitalist economies. For all their trumpeting of the "natural laws" of competition and "freedom" for employers to exploit and workers to be fired, capitalism violates our true natures in fundamental ways.

So the question should be, as Anderson eventually alludes to, do we have a life ethic that includes work, rather than just a work ethic? She states plainly that the most important product of the whole economic system is ... people. Their reproduction, raising, education, and flourishing. It is not consumption products that should be the measure of economic policy, but human happiness. And a major form of human happiness is doing meaningful work, including the domestic work of the family. The world of Star Trek is even alluded to in Anderson's last chapter- one where no one works for subsistance, but rather, people work for fulfillment. And they do so with zeal.

Anderson sees great potential in the more progressive forms of the work ethic, and in the social democratic political systems that implemented them after World War 2. She argues that this is the true legacy of Marxism (and of Thomas Paine, interestingly enough) and expresses the most durable compromise between market and capital-driven corporate structures and a restored work ethic. Some amount of worker participation in corporate governance, for instance, is a fundamental reform that would, in the US, make corporations more responsive to their cultural stakeholders, and work more meaningful to workers. Tighter regulation is needed throughout the private economy to make work more humane for the very low-paid, giving workers better pay and more autonomy- real freedom. More public goods, such as free education to university levels, and better provision for the poor, especially in the form of a job guarantee, would make life bearable for many more people. For my part, inheritance seems a key area where the ethics of the dignified work and equal opportunity run up against completely unjust and artificial barriers. In America, no one should be born rich, and everyone should grow and express themselves by finding a place in the world of work.

• Annals of capitalist control.
• Corporations and the royal we.
• More equal societies are better societies.
• The Stepford wife.
• The Supreme Court is dangerously wrong.

Damned if You do, Damned if You Don't

The Cherokee trail of tears, and the Palestinian conundrum.

History is a long and sad tale of conflict, interspersed with better times when people can put their animosities aside. Just as economics deals in scarcity and its various solutions, history likewise turns on our inevitable drive towards overpopulation, with resulting scarcity and conflict. Occasionally, special technological, spiritual, organizational achievements- or catastrophes- may allow periods of free population growth with its attendant bouyant mood of generosity. But more commonly, groups of people covet each other's resources and plot ways to get them. This was one of the lessons of Malthus and Darwin, who addressed the deeper causes of what we see as historical events.

The "New World" provided Europeans with an unprecedented release for their excess populations, especially the malcontented, the desperate, and the ambitious. They rhapsodized about the "virgin" lands that lay open, generally dismissing the numerous and well-organized natives present all over these lands, as "savages", occupying a lower technological and theological level of existence. There were plenty of rationalizations put forth, like Christianizing the natives, or "civilizing" them. But the hypocrisy of these formulations becomes clear when you consider the fate of the Cherokees, one of the "five civilized tribes". 

By the early 1800's, a couple of centuries of contact had already gone under the bridge, (as narrated by Pekka Hämäläinen in "Indigenous continent"), and native Americans were all integrated to various degrees in trading networks that brought them European goods like guns, pots, knives, and novel practices like horse riding. The Cherokees, occupying the lower Appalachians and piedmont between what is now Georgia and Alabama, were more integrated than most, adopting European farming, living, schooling, and governing practices. They even owned African American slaves, and wrote themselves a US-modeled constitution in 1827, in the script devised the scholar Sequoya.

Did this "progress" toward assimilation with the European culture help them? Far from! Their excellence in farming, literacy, and government raised fears of competition in the white colonists, and the Georgia state government lobbied relentlessly for their removal. Andrew Jackson finally obliged. He pressured the Cherokees to re-open their status as a settled nation, devised a removal treaty with a minority party, and then sent all the Cherokees in the region (about 16,000) off on the Trail of Tears, to the barren lands of Oklahoma. These Cherokees lost roughly a quarter of their population along the way, in a brutal winter. Compare this with the partition of India, where about twelve percent of the refugees are thought to have perished, out of roughly 16 million total.

A small part of the annals of ethnic cleansing, US edition. Needless to say, the "Indian territory" ended up a lot smaller than originally promised.

 

Georgia was thus ethnically cleansed, and does not seem to experience a great deal of regret about it. The logic of power is quite simple- the winner gets the land and spoils. The loser is lucky to not be killed. That the Europeans were significantly more powerful than their native antagonists doesn't change the logic, though it might appeal to our empathy and nostalgia in retrospect. The Cherokees and other Native Americans might have been accepted into US society. They might have been given one or two states for their sovereign governments, as the Mormons managed. There were a lot of possibilities that might have made us a more interesting and diverse nation. But at the same time, most Native Americans participated fully in the politics of power, terrorizing each other, making slaves of each other, and killing each other. They were not innocents. So the fact that they came up against a stronger power was hardly a novelty, though in this case that power was blundering and cruel, shared very few of their cultural coordinates, and was highly hypocritical about its own.

All this comes to mind when viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel won the major Middle East wars that so dramatically emasculated the Palestinians, first in the civil war that left Jordan and Egypt in charge of the Palestinian areas, then in the 1967 war that left all these areas in Israeli hands. But what to do with them? On founding, Israel was a liberal, New Testament kind of country, with humanist values and lefty kibbutzim. The then-recent Holocaust also caused a bit of hesitance when it came to either killing or exiling the losing Palestinians. Indeed, given that its neighbors Jordan and Egypt lost these wars, it would have made some sense at that time to deport all the Palestinians, of which there were about one to two million. But rather than do that, or make a firm border, Israel immediately started encroaching into Palestinian territory with security areas and "settlements", and has set up an ever more elaborate, though selectively porous and self-serving, security and boundary system.

Both sides have a schizophrenic reaction to the other. On the Palestinian side, the psychology of losing has meant quietism and acquiescence by some, but resentment and militantcy by others. Both lead to a spiral of worse treatment, the weakness of the former inviting abuse, and the desperate depredations of the latter inciting revenge, "security" measures, and tighter occupation. The provocations by each side are unendurable, and thus the situation deteriorates. Yet, in the end, Israel has all the power and the responsibility to come up with a long term solution. Over the decades, Israel has morphed from its founding ethos into something much more conservative and Old Testament, less beholden to the humanisitic ideals of the post-WW2 period. The wanton killing, starvation, and collective punishment of Gaza makes visible this moral breakdown.

The Palestinians can't win either way, either through Hamas's implacable hatred and impotent attacks, nor through the acquiescence of the Palestinian National Authority, which, in thanks for its good behavior, has received the creeping expansion of Israeli "settlements" on its land. These now take up, according to a detailed map, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the land of the West Bank. Overall, the options are: 1) to expel the Palestinians outright, which appears to be, for Gaza at least, where Israeli policy is heading, (made more ironic by the realization by historians that the Biblical Exodus never actually took place), or 2) to continue to muddle along in a torturous occupation with creeping dispossession, or 3) to grant Palestine some kind of autonomy and statehood. Assimilation, (4), long dreamt of by some, seems impossible for a state that is fundamentally an ethnic (or theological) state, and whose whole raison d'etre is ethnic separation, not to even mention the preferences of the Palestinians. Though perhaps assimiliation without voting rights, in sort of semi-slavery or apartheid, is something the Israelies would be attracted to? Perhaps insignia will need to be worn by all Palestinians, sewn to their clothing?

Map of the West Bank of the Jordan, color coded by Palestinian marginal control in brown, and settler/Israeli control in red.

What should happen? Indigenous Americans were infected, decimated, hunted down, translocated, re-educated, and confined to a small and very remote system of reservations. Hopefully we have have progressed a little since then, as a largely European civilization, which is putatively shared by Israel. Thus the only way forward, as is recognized by everyone outside Israel, is the two-state solution, including a re-organization of the Palestinian territories into a final, clearly demarked, and contiguous state. Israel's current political system will never get there. But we can help the process along in a few ways.

First, it is disappointing to see our current administration shipping arms to Israel at a furious pace, only to see them used to kill thousands of innocent, if highly resentful, civilians. Israel has plenty of its own money to buy whatever it needs elsewhere. We need to put some limitations on our military and other aid relationships, to motivate change. (Though that raises the question of Israel's increasingly cozy relationship with Russia). Second, we should recognize Palestine as a state, and bring forward its integration into the international system. This will not resolve its borders or myriad security and territory issues viz Israel, but it would helpfully motivate things in that direction. Israel has constantly cried wolf about the lack of a credible partner to negotiate with, but that is irrelevant. Israel is perfectly capable of building the walls it needs to keep Palestinians at bay. But then it wants pliant workers as well, and a peaceful neighbor, security viz Jordan and Egypt, territorial encroachments, and many other things that are either destructive, or need to be negotiated. 

By far the most constructive thing that could be done is to freeze and re-organize the Jewish settlements and other periphernalia that have metastasized all over the West Bank. There is no future without a decent and fair solution in territory, which is the third big thing we need to press- our own detailed territorial plan for Palestine. For one thing, Israel could easily vacate the whole corridor / valley facing Jordan. That would give a consolidated Palestine a working border with a country that is now peaceful, quite well run, and friendly to both sides. There are countless possible maps. We just need to decide on one that is reasonably fair and force it on both sides, which are each, still after all these years, apparently unwilling to imagine a true peace. This means principally forcing it on Israel, which has been the dominant and recalcitrant party the entire time.

The Cherokees are now one of the largest indigenous populations in the US, at roughly a quarter million, with their own territory of about seven thousand square miles in Oklahoma. They have internal and partial sovereignty, which means that they deal with their own affairs on a somewhat independent basis, but otherwise are largely subject to most laws of the enclosing governments. The Cherokees could easily have been assimilated into the US. Only racism stood in the way, in a mindset that had long descended into a blind and adversarial disregard of all native Americans as "others", (the irony!), competitive with and less than, the newly arrived immigrants. We could have done much better, and one would like to think that, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years on, we would have.

In the end, the West (read as European civilization, as developed out of the ashes of World War 2) is either for or against wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and human rights. Israel has won its wars, but never faced up to its responsibilities to the conquered Palestinians, and has tried to have it both ways, to be viewed by the world as a modern, enlightened state, even as it occupies and slowly strangles the people it defeated decades ago. 

• Slovenly strategic thinking. But really, visionless long-term politics.
• One Gazan speaks.
• Settler colonialism.
• Who's the victim?
• Shades of Scientology ... the murky networks of the deep evangelical state.
• In California, solar still makes sense.

America as Hegemon

The imperial track record is not good, but the hegemonic track record isn't all that bad.

I was recently visiting the USS Hornet, a WW2-era aircraft carrier now turned into a museum on San Francisco bay. Soon after, it was Fleet Week, when the US navy pays a visit to the Bay Area in force, capped by a Blue Angels air show. An appalling display of naked militarism, granted. But also an occasion to reflect on our world-wide empire, the nature of American power, the competence of our military, and the state of things internationally.

It was a little weird, seeing decades-old technology swooping up and down the bay, which has been, beneath this benevolent protection, so restlessly advancing the technological frontier in totally different directions- computers, phones, applications, streaming, social media. Which trends are more important for America's place in the world? Which technologies rule? What are we doing with all this military hardware? I tend to have pretty conservative views on all this, that the US is right to stick with the post-WW2 consensus that our military should be as strong as possible, and partner with like-minded countries around the world to advance the vision of that era, of human rights and democracy for all. 

When we have tried to do this task directly, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, however, it has generally turned out very badly. The Iraq war was misconceived from the start, and went downhill from there. Despite the laudible aim of sparing the Iraqi people from the continued depredations of Saddam Hussein, the lying and the incompetence at all levels made the cure far worse than the disease, with anarchy and hundreds of thousands dead. But let's write that one off as a George Bush-as-decider blunder.

The Afghanistan debacle is more painful to contemplate, in some ways, in what it says about our fundamental incompetence as an imperial power. Its rationale was straightforward, international support wide-spread, and our power there absolute in the opening acts of the takeover. Yet with all those advantages, we ended up, twenty years later, turning tail and watching our hand-built Afghan military melt away even before we left the country. The Russians had, frankly, a better record in their Imperial Afghan turn. 

It is an appalling track record, really. We evidently and thankfully do not have the advantage of ruthlessness that ancient Rome enjoyed, or modern day spoilers like Russia and Iran. But nor, apparently, do we have the advantage of friendly relations, favorable hearts & minds, and good intelligence. We were constantly led astray by "friends" with all kinds of personal vendettas and agendas. We pride ourselves in our independence from the rest of the world, and thus know little about it, which means that we go into these settings woefully unprepared, besotted by whatever ideological issue du jure is fashionable in the US. Our priorities in Afghanistan seemed to be to hold elections and educate women. But were those the right aims? And even if so, were they carried out with any kind of wisdom and sense of priorities and proper preparation?

Most concretely, our military relationship was a disaster. The US military tried to make the new Afghan military into its own image and graft onto it its own systems and capablities, creating a dependence that caused immediate failure when Afghans caught wind that we were really, actually, going to leave. This was an incredible result, especially after the US military had been responsible for "training" countless militaries all over the world for decades. 

What on earth were we doing? Similarly to the intelligence failures, the military failures came from some fundamental inability to understand the problem at hand, and work with the society as it existed. Instead of creating a sustainable, right-sized, and politically viable force, we just assumed we were the good guys and anything we did was good. There was an intrinsic tension between leaving the society as it was, thereby just funding a reboot of a Taliban-like (or northern alliance-like) force to keep the country pacified, and forcing some change, on social, political, economic, and technological levels, by changing the form of government and associated institutions. The US clearly did not invade Afghanistan to keep everything the same. But by overreaching, we essentially achieved nothing, allowing precisely the group we dethroned to come back into power, and casting the country back into its pre-invasion economic and social abyss. At least, thanks to other technological bequests of the US and the West, the Afghans now have cell phones.

So our military and other institutions do not come off well in any of their recent engagements. It is a case of losing every battle, while winning the war. For we still enjoy a hegemonic position, not thanks to our incompetent and technology-bedazzled military, but thanks to our friends, with whom we still lead the world. The core groups of the anglophone countries, NATO, and the East Asian alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan remain the core of the developed world, enjoying peaceful relations, democracy, and prosperous economies. China is advancing mightily to displace that grouping, but can not do so alone, and has little hope of doing so with streadfast friends like Russia and North Korea by its side.

Tiers of development. Blue is the developed world, yellow the middle-tier (developing), and red, the lower tiers of development (desperately developing, one might say).

The advantages of joining this developed core are so evident, that one wonders why it is under threat, both from the spoiler countries like Russia, and from endogenous authoritarians in the US, Poland, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. Two decades ago, we were looking at the end of history, when a futuristic society of peace and contentment would inherit the post-cold war earth, Russia would join NATO, and we would live happily ever after. But democracy is a cultural pattern that not everyone can easily understand, especially people who run (or want to run) undemocratic countries. As our framers understood so well, sovereign power is dangerous, and needs to be diluted among publicly competing branches, candidates, officers, and voters for it to be durably controlled, a bit like an atomic chain reaction. It takes wisdom and humility to figure that out and abide by such fundamental (constitutional) rules. 

It is tempting to take that power directly in hand, to satisfy a burning desire to "do something". In the US, a Republican minority has progressively lost its commitment to popular rule and the viability of contemporary governmental institutions. This is, incidentally, only possible because of their special relationship with sources of money and of media influence, without which they would have little popular purchase. In China, the communist party figured that, despite its own history of ravaging its country, it had developed a stable enough system of governance, and had obtained implicit popular support ... reflecting either brainwashing or acquiescence ... that it did not need actual elections or Western-style divided government. And in Russia, the bitterness of its descent into kleptocracy, under the poisoned banner of "capitalism", combined with various snubs from the West and general historical and cultural distance, rendered the idea of becoming a Western country too much to bear.

Each authoritarian system has, like an unhappy family, its own reasons, while the happy families of the West seem to, think along similar lines almost involuntarily, at least until some authoritarian mountebank comes along to solve all our problems by doing away with our safeguards. We are in a grand race to find out which systems are more stable. Those that rely on one person, such as the aging Vladimir Putin, for their decisions, or those that rely on popular will and a controlling set of institutions. The lessons of history could not be more stark, telling us that the former is the bigger crapshoot. Sometimes it turns out well, but more often not. That is why liberalism and deliberative democracy developed in the first place.

There remains a great deal of middle ground around the world. The muslim countries, for example, form a middle tier of populous and developing countries comprising, between Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and others, well over a billion people. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't help our relations there, but on the other hand, China is hardly making itself loved either, with its extermination campaign in Xinjiang. The cultural patterns of the Islamic world make it a particularly hard sell for Western democracy vs authoritariansim. Thus the brief Arab Spring came to a painful and inglorious end, mostly in whimpers, sometimes in horror. The liberatlization process took a long time in the West as well, measured perhaps from the French revolution, through the revolutions of 1848, culminating the aftermath of World War 2, with developmental delays in the Eastern European deep freeze. Ideas and new social patterns take a long time to take root, even when the templates (Switzerland, the US, ancient Greece) are at hand.

The American hegemony is little more than an agreement among like-minded and friendly nations to maintain their democratic systems, their prosperous (if environmentally rapacious and unsustainable) economies, and to largely offload their military responsibilities on the US. Whether those responsibilities have been well-stewarded is certainly doubtful. But up to this point, the agreement has been highly successful, mostly because the US has been a willing, stable, and vigorous anchor. Can the EU take our place? It is conceivable, but the EU is structurally less decisive. Bodies like the UN or the G20 are even less capable, in any executive sense. So, until we come up with something better, with a hot war against Russia and a cold one developing against China, and while other cultures are slowly chewing over their various problems with authoritarianism, it is critical that the US remain that anchor for the democratic developed world.

• What are the rules, anyhow?
• Bad intelligence.
• History is important to authoritarians, at least.
• Argentina is in the throes of inflation.
• The totalitarian speakership is bad for democracy, as well as being unworkable with thin majorities.

Prisons as Social Prisms, Mirrors, and Shadows

From deTocqueville to BLM by way of Solzhenitsyn.

Carl Jung promoted the concept of the psychological shadow- that part of ourselves that is dark, bad, and repressed. It tends to be what we project on others, leading to the kind of political and cultural polarization we see so much of today. For individuals, integrating the shadow, (that is, at least perceiving it, if not valuing it), is difficult but an important path to a more mature and integrated self. Societies have similar psychological characteristics, and have shadows that they project on others, both other cultures and unfortunate classes in their own system. Unlike shadow elements in individual psychology, which are all too easily hidden and ignored, people are harder to keep out of sight, so societies do a lot of explicit work to heap opprobrium on the lower classes- minorities and the poor, in a social process that keeps the social hierarchy stable, and keeps the majority self-satisfied.

A big product of the shadow work of society has appeared in prisons. In primitive times, no one had prisons, and criminals were tortured, killed or ostracized. Now, the world is too small, ethical standards have risen somewhat, and we have turned to prisons as a general purpose punishment- a modern form of ostracism. Prisons express (and contain) our attitudes and definitions of antisocial activity and contagion. Alexis de Toqueville came to the early US to investigate our prisons, as a way of gaining insight into our society, before being waylaid into a much more general tour of this vibrant country. But his instincts were sound. France had been through its revolution only forty years prior, with its gruesome imprisonments and executions, which mirrored the tumultuous reversals of the social order. In the US, de Toqueville found a relatively unsophisticated and small carceral system, as money was short and there was plenty of room for criminals to disappear out west. It did not turn out to be an interesting prism on American life.

Today things are vastly different. The gangster era of the 20's and 30's led to a new focus on crime, noir, and high-profile prisoners like Al Capone. The crime and drug era of the 80's and 90's led to an almost four-fold increase in the prison population, so that now the US leads the world with a prison population of roughly 0.5% of the population behind bars. The BLM movement and defund the police movements were in part about recognizing that something had gone serious astray here. Whether it originated from environmental lead poisoning, or social breakdown, or drug cartels, the result was a huge population of ostracized, mostly male, and disproportionately minority people locked away. On top of that, the society had lost interest in rehabilitation amidst its turn to more conservative attitudes that valorize the rich and powerful and disparage the poor and disadvantaged. 

Our prisons today say alot about us as a society. Not that prisons are not needed, and that there aren't true criminals and insidious criminal organizations that prey on the rest of society; but our lack of empathy and lack of a wider social vision is palpable. Particularly, our attachment to property, its "rights", its local and parochial control, and particularly its inheritance, has gotten a little extreme. It is the perpetuation of privileges through property and wealth that explain a lot of the persistent lack of social mobility, the vast industries of greed/tax avoidance, easily politicized fears. Capitalism is at its heart competitive, and having winners of billions implies also having losers- those who sleep on the street, and those locked up, not to mention the hordes of low-wage workers who make everything go.

All this came to mind as I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. It is a vast tome, befitting the vast archipelago it describes, its huge population, its protracted duration, its unimaginable suffering, and what it says about its society. While unexpectedly enjoyable to read, as Solzhenitsyn is joking the whole time in various sarcastic and dark modes, it is an indictment of Soviet Russia on a comprehensive basis. One particularly striking theme that he weaves through is comparison with the Tsarist period that came before. Solzhenitsyn meets prisoners, often dedicated socialist revolutionaries, who had done time under the Tsar, and regarded that experience as heaven compared to what they were faced with now, under Stalin. To put it very bluntly, Russia used to be a civilized country. Now, under the Bolsheviks, torture of the most vile kinds is practiced, less vile kinds are routine, execution is carried out on a whim, and law and justice are a mockery. The Gulag is loaded up with many orders of magnitude more political prisoners than the Tsar had ever contemplated and works them mercilessly to early graves.

Breaking rocks in the gulag.

While this all mostly reflected the paranoia and totalitarian genius of Stalin, he was only following his model, Lenin, as Solzhenitsyn lays out in particularly damning detail. The larger Russian society clearly had, and still has, an ambivilent nature, as close students and subjects of the Mongols, but also as eager to engage with and learn from Western Europe. Who knew that the most left-tinged and idealistic ideology to be imported from the West would so quickly curdle into a second coming of Ivan the terrible? But so it did, and Solzhenitsyn describes what that really meant in human suffering, in this book that may have done more than any other to delegitimize and ultimately destroy that system.

• The neighborhood to prison pipeline in the US.
• The questionable science of ice cream.
  

Drought Causes Cultural Breakdown

What happened to the Hittites, and the late Bronze Age?

Climate change is already causing wars and migration, misery on a vast scale. The global South takes the heat, while the global North keeps making it, pumping out the CO2. Can we adapt, or is the human population going to decrease, either gently or not so gently, as conditions deteriorate? The answer is not at all clear. The adaptation measures taken by the rich world involve highly contentious politics, and uncertain technology that, at best, requires a great deal more resource extraction. The poor, on the other hand, are left to either try developing (if they can maintain good political and economic governance) to join the rich in their extractive ways, (China, India), or migrate en masse to rich countries (Africa, Central America). All this is going to get worse, not better, since we are still at peak CO2 emissions and only beginning the process of global heating.

Our emissions of CO2 are still going up, not down. Therefore climate change will be getting worse, faster. Conflict is one likely outcome.

Well, migrations and dislocation have happened before. Over the last millennium, it was cold temperatures, not hot, that have correlated with conflict. Epic migrations occurred in the declining days of the Roman Empire, when the Huns drove a domino series of migrations of Germanic tribes that fought their way throughout Europe. What prompted the Huns out of the Asian steppe is unknown, however. Jared Diamond wrote of several other cultures that met their end after exhausing their resources and technologies. A recent paper added one more such case- the Hittites of late Bronze Age.

The Hittites were a big deal in their time (1700 to 1200 BCE, very roughly), running what is now Eastern and Southern Turkey, and occasionally Syria and points South. They were an early offshoot of the Indo-European migrations, and had a convulsive (though not very well understood) history of rises and falls, mostly due to their political dynamics. At the height of Hittite power, they fought Egypt directy at the battle of Kadesh, (1274 BCE), which occured just a little north of current-day Lebanon. This was the complex frontier between Assyria / Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Egyptian history is full of expeditions- military, economic, and diplomatic- through the Levant.

The Hittites were artists as well as warriors.

The Hittites were also one of several communities around the Mediterranean that shared in the late Bronze Age collapse. This is the epic time that saw the Greek siege of Troy, (~1200 BCE), and the "Sea People's" invasion of Egypt. Its causes and details remain a long-standing historical mystery. But its scale was vast. Greece entered its dark age that lasted from 1200 to the 800's BCE. North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Levant, and the Caucaus all declined. Assyria and Egypt were weakened, but did not collapse. The latest paper uses tree-ring data from junipers from around the former Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey to more precisely date a severe drought that may have caused this collapse. Drought is just the kind of cause that would have been wide-spread enough and foundational enough to destroy the regional economies and prompt migrations and wars. Wars.. there are always wars, but no single war would have caused the collapse of cultures on such a wide scale, including a weakening of Egypt. Plagues are also not a great candidate, since they do not harm a society's resource base, but only its population. Such population reductions typically benefit the survivors, who rebuild in short order.

Moisture levels inferred from tree ring data, with lower values dryer. There are three consecutive catastrophic years dated to 1198-1196 BCE in this region, which is around the ancient Hittite capital. The ensuing decade was also unusually dry and likely poor for agriculture. The 20% and 6.25% levels of drought are by comparison to wider sampling, including modern data.

The drought these authors identified and located with precision was extraordinary. They note that, using modern data for indexing, the 20% level (representing about 30 cm of annual rain) is the minimum viable threshold for growing wheat. The 6.25% level is far below that and represents widespread crop failure. They developed two types of data from the tree rings, drawn from 18 individual trees whose rings spanned about a thousand years across the second millenium BCE. First is the size of the rings themselves, whose data are shown above. Second is the carbon 13 isotope ratio, which is a separate index of dryness, based on the isotopic discrimination that plants exercise over CO2 respiration under different climatic conditions. 

The same tree rings that provided the inferences above from their geometry (width) also here provided carbon 13 isotope data that lead to a similar conclusion, though with much less precision. High proportions of C13 indicate drier climate, here continuous around 1200 BCE.

The paper shows three consecutive years at the 6.25% level of rainfall, starting at 1198 BC. The ensuing decade was also harshly dry. All this correlates with cuneiform texts found in the Levant that were letters from the Hittites, bemoaning their drought and begging for assistance. But everyone in the region was in a similar position. The Hittite culture never recovered. 

So drought is now a leading hypothesis for the ultimate cause of the late Bronze Age collapse around many parts of the Mediterranean, with Greece and Anatolia particularly affected. While it is reasonable to imagine that such conditions would lead to desperation, migration, and war, there is no direct link yet. The nature and origin of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt remain unknown, for instance. The reasons for the seige of Troy are lost to myth. The Illiad never mentions drought, nor would Troy have been in a much better position than Mycenaean Greece, climatically speaking. But the consequences of geopolitical shifts in alignment can be unpredictable, as we continue to experience today. It is exciting (as well as sobering) to get a glimpse into this cloudy history- into a vast swath of human experience that built great cultures and suffered epic defeats.

• The planet can just go to hell.
• And so can our political system and media.
• The next Mein Kampf.
• Maybe governments should really do things themselves.

The Politics of Resentment

Ann Applebaum has seen where all this Trumpism is going ... in Eastern Europe.

Liberals in America are baffled. How could anyone vote for Republican candidates at this point? How could anyone, let alone half the electorate, vote for Trump? We are befuddled and anxious for the future of America, which, far from becoming great again, is turning into a banana republic before our eyes, if, hopefully, not worse. We in California are particularly dissociated, as Democrats run the whole state, and Republican voter registration continues to decline year after year and is now under one quarter of the electorate. What does the rest of the country see that we do not? Or vice versa?

Ann Applebaum has written a trenchant book on the matter, "Twilight of Democracy". She lives in Poland, so has had a front-row seat to the illiberalization of a political system, both in Poland and in nearby Hungary, which seems farther advanced. Eastern Europe has more reason than most, perhaps to be disillusioned with the capitalist orthodoxy, after their rather rough transition from Communism. But this is a world-wide phenomenon, sweeping fringe rightists into power from Brazil to Sweden. What is going on? Applebaum posits that the whole structure of meritocratic representative democracy, with its open competition for (good) public policy, and use of educated expertise over vast areas of state interests from foreign affairs to monetary regulation and education policy, have come under fundamental critique. And this critique comes partly from those who have been shut out of that system: the not-well-educated, not-bicoastal, not-rich, not-acronymed-minority, not-hopeful about the American future. It is, in short, a politics of resentment.

How have the elites done over the post-world war 2 period? They won the cold war, but lost virtually every battle in it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. They let the lower classes of the US sink into relative poverty and powerlessness vs business and the well-educated classes, in a rather brutal system of collegiate competition, de-unionization, off-shoring and worker suppression. They have let the economy fester through several crushing recessions, particularly the malaise of the 70's and the real estate meltdown of 2008. While the US has done pretty well overall, the lower middle and poor classes have not done well, and live increasingly precarious lives that stare homelessness in the face daily. In the heartland, parents at best saw their children fly off to coastal schools and cultures, becoming different people who would not dream of coming home again to live.

America is heavily red, geographically.

And the elite-run state has become increasingly sclerotic, continually self-criticizing and regulating its way to inaction. A thousand well-meaning regulations have paved the way to a bloated government that can not build a high-speed rail line in California, or solve the homelessness crisis. Everyone is a critic, including yours truly- it is always easier to raise objections, cover one's ass, and not get anything done. So one can sympathize with evident, if inchoate, desires for strength- for someone to break the barriers, bring the system to heel, and build that wall. Or get Brexit done. Or whatever the baying right wing media want at the moment.

The elite party in this sense is the Democratic party - capturing the coastal and well-educated, plus public employee unions. The Republican party, the party of money and the rich, (not the elite at all!), has conversely become the party of the downtrodden, feeding them anti-immigrant, anti-elite, anti-state red meat. It was a remarkably easy transformation, that required only shamelessness and lying to make hay out of the vast reserves of resentment seething in middle America. 

But Applebaum's point is not that the elites have messed things up and it may be time to do things differently. No, she suggests that the new protofascists have reframed the situation fundamentally. The elites in power have, through the hard work of meritocratic institutions, set up pipelines and cultures that reproduce their position in power almost as hermetically as the ancien régime of France and its nobility. That anyone can (theoretically) enter this elite and that it is at least somewhat vetted for competence and rationality is disregarded, or actively spat upon as "old" thinking- definitely not team thinking. The path to power now is to stoke resentment, overturn the old patterns of respect for competence and empathy, discard this meritocratic system in favor of one based on loyalty and fealty, and so bring about a new authoritarianism that brooks no "softness", exercises no self-criticism, has no respect for the enemy or for compromise, and has no room for intellectuals. 

But Hungary is way ahead of us, in the one-party rule department.

A second angle on all this is that conservatives feel resentful for another good reason- that they have lost the culture war. Despite all their formal power, winning the presidency easily half the time, and regularly running legislative branches and judicial branches in the US, their larger cultural project to keep progress at bay, fight moral "decadence" and all the other hobby horses, have gone nowhere. The US is increasingly woke, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and the "blood and soil" types (including especially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals), are despondent about it. Or apoplectic, or rabid, etc., depending on temperament. Their triumph in overturning Roe may allow some backwater states to turn back the clock, but on the whole, it looks like a rearguard action.

This is what feeds disgust with the system, and with democracy itself. Republicans who used to sing the praises of the US government, the flag, and democracy now seem to feel the opposite, that the US is a degenerate wasteland, no better than other countries, not exceptional, not dedicated to serious ideals that others should also aspire to. Democracy has failed, for them. And Applebaum points out how this feeling licenses the loss of civility, the lying, the anything-goes demagoguery which characterizes our new right-wing politics. Naturally the internet and its extremism-feeding algorithms have a lot to do with it as well. Applebaum is conservative herself. She spent a career working in the Tory media in Britain, but is outraged at what Tory-ism, and conservatism internationally, has become. She sees a dramatic split in conservatism, between those that still buy into the democratic, liberal system, and those who have become its opponents, in their revolutionary, Trumpy fervor. In the US, the fever may possibly have broken, after a very close brush with losing our institutions during the last administration, as election after election has made losers of the far right.

Over the long haul, Applebaum sees this as a cyclical process, with ample precedent from ancient Egyptian times through today, with a particularly interesting stop in the viciously polarized Drefussard period in France. But I see one extra element, which is our planetary and population crisis. We had very good times over the last few centuries building the human population and its comforts on the back of colonization, fossil fuels, and new technologies. The US of the mid to late-20th century exemplified the good times of such growth. Now the ecological bells are ringing, and the party is coming to an end. Denial has obviously been the first resort of the change-averse, and conservatives have distinguished themselves in their capabilities in that department. But as reality gradually sets in, something more sinister and competitive may be in the offing, as exemplified by the slogan "America First". Not first as in a leader of international institutions, liberal democracies and enlightenment values, but first as in looking out for number one, and devil take the rest. 

Combined with a rejuvinated blood and soil nationalism, which we see flourishing in so many places, these attitudes threaten to send us back into a world resembling that before world war 1 or 2, (and, frankly, all the rest of history), when nationalism was the coin of international relations, and national competition knew no boundaries- mercantile or military. We are getting a small foretaste of this in Russia's war on Ukraine, which is a product of precisely this Russia-first, make Russia great again mind-set. Thankfully, it is accompanied by large helpings of stupidity and mismanagement, which may save us yet. 

• It can be done.
• Another view of the fascism process.
• Corporate values and power are at all time highs.
• The penguins are in peril.
• "Intelligent" design is still about.
• Go Fetterman, and others with disabilities.