(No) Sympathy for the Devil

Blaming ourselves for Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Here we are, in a time warp back almost a century. A European country has elected an authoritarian leader, on the support of a doddering president. That leader went on to resolve the economic and politicial crisis of the country, mostly by taking complete control himself and forming an increasingly repressive fascist state. Nationalist propaganda and lies were ceaselessly conveyed through the state media, paving the way for attacks on other countries, generally portrayed as critical to protect fellow countrymen being oppressed there. The aggression and the lying escalated until here we are, in a full scale international war, with distinct chances of becoming a world war. 

In the US, there are strange convergences of support for the Russian side of this conflict. Those on the fringe left can not tear themselves away from respect for the Russia that was the Soviet union and vanguard of world communism. Nor can they resist bashing the US. The far right is infatuated with the new Russia, with its super-Trump leadership, free-wheeling criminality, and clever propaganda, as many Americans were of Hitler back in the day. But a third stream comes from the foreign policy establishment- the realists, who think spheres of influence are the most normal, god-given organizing principles of international affairs. Thus China should be given its suzerainty over South East Asia, including Taiwan, and Russia over its near abroad, whatever the people actually living there may think. We are to blame for pushing NATO to Russia's borders, we are to blame for injuring Russia's sensitivities and pride, and we have caused their invasion of Ukraine, by luring Ukraine to the West with our sweet blandishments.

Well, each of those views is out of touch in its own way, but the last is especially curious. For what was the post-World War 2 order about, if not about civilized behavior among nations, letting each seek prosperity and freedom, in peace? The realist view would plunge us back into medieval power relations, or perhaps the three-sphere world of George Orwell's 1984. It consigns small countries to the depredations of bullies like Russia, who can not make friends in a civilized manner, but, in Ukraine, has strained every nerve to corrupt its political system, destroy its internet, and obliterate its sovereignty and economy.

It is obvious to all, including Russia, that NATO was and remains a defensive alliance, of countries intent above all else to rebuild after World War 2 without further aggressive encroachment by Russia. And once the Soviet Union fell apart, the Eastern Bloc countries fled as fast as they could to the West, not because they wanted to attack Russia in a new World War 3, but quite the opposite- they wanted to pursue the promise of freedom and prosperity in peace, without bullying from Russia. Russia's much vaunted "sensitivities" are nothing more than toxic, domineering nostalgia for their former oppressive empires, of both Czarist and Soviet times. As the largest country in the world, one would think they have enough room, but no, their sense of greatness, unmatched by commensurate cultural, economic, or moral accomplishment, demands bullying of its neighbors. More to the point, their current system of government- autocracy / fascism by ceaseless lying and propaganda, would be impaired by having their close neighbors have more open, civilized systems. 

All this has a religious aspect that is interesting to note as well. Ukraine recently extricated itself from domination by the Moscow orthodox church, becoming autocephalic, in the term of art. The process shows that even in this supposedly supernatural sphere of pure timeless principle, tribalism and politics are the order of the day. Not to mention propaganda, and fanciful philosophy and history. The narratives that Russia as spun about Ukraine and its invasion are particularly virulent, unhinged, and insulting, insuring that Ukraine would never, in any sane world, want to have anything to do with their neighbor. It is one more aspect of the Russian aggression that spares us from needing to sympathize overly with its "sensitivities".

So, what to do? It is not clear that Ukraine can withstand Russian attacks forever. They have stopped Russia in its tracks, thanks to a lot of Western assistance. They have millions of men under arms, compared to a much smaller invasion force. They have motivation and they have the land. But they need heavier weapons and they need to preserve their air power. With those two things, they could turn the tide and drive Russia out. Without them, they will probably only manage a stalemate. Western sanctions have imposed highly justifiable pain on Russia itself, but historically, such sanctions tend to have as much countervailing effect, consolidating pro-government attitudes, as the opposite. So barring a dramatic turn of events at the top of the Russian system, which is highly unpredictable and rather unlikely, we are facing a very drawn out and destructive war in Ukraine.

In a larger sense, we are facing something far more momentous- the rise and assertion of autocracy (not to say fascism 2.0) as a competing world order. Russia's pattern has been clear enough (and historically eerie)- escalate their aggression and ambition as far as they can get away with. And China is watching carefully. The ability of the West to punish Russia for its completely immoral and cruel attack on Ukraine, and deter future repetitions, will shape the next century. Russia has decisively broken the borders and tranquility of the post-World War 2 order, and that has caused many, especially in Europe, to wake up and realize that coasting along on US coat tails is not enough- they have to actively participate in sanctioning Russia, in resolving their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (as if that had not been patently obvious before), and strengthening the collective defence, as expressed in NATO. Western leaders should make it clear that Putin and his key lieutenants will never be allowed to personally enter the West without being shipped off the Hague for trial. And we should give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself.

Finally, what of our own culpability? Not so much in mistreating Russia, which we have done only to a slight degree, but in committing war crimes of our own, in attacks of our own, based on lies of our own, on innocent countries far distant. I am speaking of Iraq (which ranks first among several other cases). While our justification for that war was far better than Russia's in Ukraine, it was still poor, still caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, was grievously misconceived and mismanaged, and has left a political ruin, not to mention a geopolitical mess. This alone should make George W Bush rank among the worst of US presidents- significantly lower than Trump, who for all his destructiveness, did not destroy whole countries. We should be willing to put Bush and others who made those decisions to an historical and international account for their actions, in a spirit of historical rectitude.

• In praise of Washington's teaming minions.
• New thoughts on an old book.
• A song for Ukraine.

Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

• Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
• Apparently, we are all going to die.
• Tires are bad.

What Would be an Effective Carbon Tax?

Carbon taxes could be effective if they are high enough. None are high enough now.

Look around, and you are struck by the myriad ways we use and waste fossil fuels. Live pigs are shipped by the airplane load from the US to China. Wildfires caused by global warming are fought with tanker airplanes. Plastic shopping bags by the trillion are churned out for single use followed by permanent entombment. Back-country hikers rely on helicopter rescues to get them out of jams. And of course we burn them with abandon for transport, heat, and electricity. Fossil fuels are far too cheap- from merely an efficient use perspective, quite apart from their disastrous role in climate heating, other forms of pollution, and overall sustainability.

The last decade has seen astonishing progress in renewable energy technologies, bringing them to par price with fossil fuels or even cheaper. But this price relationship is misleading, since it only reflects the low-hanging fruit of adding sporadic power to a grid that runs largely on fossil fuels with highly flexible dispatch characteristics. Making progress to a fully renewable and stable grid, and extending this to transportation, industrial processes, and chemicals will take vastly more work, including technologies not yet in hand.

We have such a long way to go to decarbonize.

The most  effective way to do this is to price the vice: price CO2 emissions. A uniform price will reach all the uses of fossil fuels, (I would add biomass as well, which generate CO2 emissions just the same), and harness the same capitalist motivation that has spent decades thoughtlessly expanding their destructive use. Government regulation can do a great deal, and is gradually driving coal to oblivion. But it will not be enough to drive the more complete transition that is needed, especially at the speed required. Climate heating is already rampant and highly destructive. 2040 is a mere 18 years away- nothing in infrastructure terms, and not much more in transport vehicle lifetimes. Natural gas remains the fuel of choice across the electric grid, residential, and industrial applications. Within twenty years, it needs to be demoted to minor status.

So what would be an effective carbon tax? One can take the baseline to be the carbon cap and trade system instituted by California, which ends up as an auction price for carbon emission credits. This is a very light tax with lots of exceptions, which has had a commensurately light effect. The price currently stands at ~$23 per ton of CO2 emitted. This is equivalent to about 22 cents per gallon of gasoline. This is not going to change many people's behavior, obviously. At ten percent or less of the retail price, this scale of tax is not going to drive a transition to electric vehicles. Overall in California, this tax brings in roughly a billion to two billion dollars per year, and is thought to be having a beneficial effect, but only as a fractional part of a much broader portfolio of regulations and policies.

In Sweden, the carbon tax is over $130 per ton. This is more significant, on the order of a dollar per gallon of gasoline. Again, there are so many exceptions, especially for heavy industry, that it touches only forty percent of emissions. Overall, it has caused only an eleven percent reduction in transport carbon emissions. Europeans pay much higher prices for motor fuels to start with, for many reasons beyond the carbon tax, so the relative effect of even such a larger tax is small. Europeans already use gasoline at a rate roughly one fifth that of the US, so are already very thrifty. We can expect in the US to have much greater elasticity to higher fuel prices, assuming a bit of political maturity instead of whining about our god-given right to cheap gasoline. 

At the same time, unless alternative fuels, forms of transport, or social behaviors appear, especially in the truck and other heavy vehicle segments, this kind of tax would still have limited effect and serious economic costs. So the modeler and prognosticator has to wonder where the response to carbon taxes will come from. The pandemic showed that we can telecommute very effectively, thereby saving prodigious amounts of fuel. Tesla has shown the way in electric vehicles- a segment that had previously been brutally decimated by GM in various bait-and-switch schemes. Hybrid technology is edging into in larger cars and transit. It will take a big price signal to switch these markets in a dramatic way. Even doubling the price of gasoline, which in the US would take a carbon tax on the order of $400 or more per ton of CO2 emitted, would only bring our fuel prices to those of Europe, which still drives, has traffic jams, and emits vast amounts of CO2 from the transport sector. Such a tax would bring in about $400 billion per year in the US, easily within the normal taxation and economic capacity of a $20 trillion economy.

Yet now there are replacement technologies, so a carbon tax will, in classic economic fashion, create change, not just disgruntlement and economic pain. It will also bring forth more replacements, while working at every margin to drive conservation. Do we need continued technology investment? Absolutely. Do we need more public policy and infrastructure investments, such as reducing give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, charging them for their many immediate as well as long-term harms, and reconfiguring electrical grids and natural gas grids? Yes. A carbon tax is an accellerant to save the biosphere from incalculable harm. Its revenue can be administered right back to citizens or into the government accounts, displacing other taxes. So its net economic effects could be minimal, even while its effects on economic reconfiguration and conservation would be strong. 

• All laws must be enforced, or what good are they?
• No wonder the internet has gone to the dogs.

American Occupations and Preoccupations

Douglass North on the role of institutions in our society, part 2. "Understanding the process of economic change". Also, "Violence and Social Orders". American occupations of Germany, Japan, and Afghanistan and Iraq are case studies of institutions at work. 

In part 1, I discussed the role of ideology and thought patterns in the context of institutional economics, which is the topic of North's book. This post will look at the implications for developmental economics. In this modern age, especially with the internet, information has never been more free. All countries have access to advanced technological information as well as the vast corpus of economics literature on how to harness it for economic development and the good of their societies. Yet everywhere we look, developing economies are in chains. What is the problem? Another way to put it that we have always had competition among relatively free and intelligent people, but have not always had civilization, and have had the modern civilization we know today, characterized by democracy and relatively free economic diversity, for only a couple of centuries, in a minority of countries. This is not the normal state of affairs, despite being a very good state of affairs.

The problem is clearly not that of knowledge, per se, but of its diffusion (human capital), and far more critically, the social institutions that put it to work. The social sciences, including economics, are evidently still in their infancy when it comes to understanding the deep structure of societies and how to make them work better. North poses the basic problem of the transition between primitive ("natural") economies, which are personal and small-scale, to advanced economies that grew first in the West after the Renaissance, and are characterized by impersonal, rule-based exchange, with a flourishing of independent organizations. Humans naturally operate on the first level, and it requires the production of a "new man" to suit him and her to the impersonal system of modern political economies. 

This model of human takes refuge in the state as the guarantor of property, contracts, money, security, law, political fairness, and many other institutions foundational to the security and prosperity of life as we know it. This model of human is comfortable interacting with complete strangers for all sorts of transactions from mundane products using the price system to complex and personal products like loans and health care using other institutions, all regulated by norms of behavior as well as by the state, where needed. This model of human develops intense specialization after a long education in very narrow productive skills, in order to live in a society of astonishing diversity of work. There is an organized and rule-based competition to develop such skills to the most detailed and extensive manner. This model of human relies on other social institutions such as the legal system, consumer review services, and standards of practice in each field to ensure that the vast asymmetry of information between the specialized sellers of other goods and services that she needs is not used against her, in fraud and other breaches of implicit faith. 

All this is rather unlike the original model, who took refuge in his or her clan, relying on the social and physical power of that group to access economic power. That is, one has to know someone to use land or get a job, to deal with other groups, to make successful trades, and for basic security. North characterizes this society as "limited access", since it is run by and for coalitions of the powerful, like the lords and nobility of medieval Europe or the warlords of Afghanistan today. For such non-modern states, the overwhelming problem is not that of economic efficiency, but of avoiding disintegration and civil war. They are made up of elite coalitions that limit violence by allocating economic rewards according to political / military power. If done accurately on that basis, each lord gets a stable share, and has little incentive to start a civil war, since his (or her) power is already reflected in his or her economic share, and a war would necessarily reduce the whole economic pie, and additionally risks reducing the lord to nothing at all. This is a highly personalized, and dynamic system, where the central state's job is mostly to make sure that each of the coalition members is getting their proper share, with changes reflecting power shifts through time.

Norman castles locations in Britain. The powers distributed through the country were a coalition that required constant maintenance and care from the center to keep privileges and benefits balanced and shared out according to the power of each local lord.

For example, the Norman invasion of Britain installed a new set of landlords, who cared nothing for the English peasants, but carried on an elite society full of jealousies and warfare amongst themselves to grab more of the wealth of the country. Most of the time, however, there was a stable balance of power, thus of land allotments, and thus of economic shares, making for a reasonably peaceful realm. All power flowed through the state, (the land allotments were all ultimately granted by the king, and in the early days were routinely taken away again if the king was displeased by the lord's loyalty or status), which is to say through this coalition of the nobles, and they had little thought for economic efficiency, innovation, legal niceties, or perpetual non-political institutions to support trade, scholarship, and innovation. (With the exception of the church, which was an intimate partner of the state.)

Notice that in the US and other modern political systems, the political system is almost slavishly devoted to "the economy", whereas in non-modern societies, the economy is a slave to the political system, which cavalierly assigns shares to the powerful and nothing to anyone else, infeudating them to the lords of the coalition. The economy is assumed to be static in its productivity and role, thus a sheer source of plunder and social power, rather than a subject of nurture and growth. And the state is composed of the elite whose political power translates immediately into shares of a static economic pie. No notion of democracy here!

This all comes to mind when considering the rather disparate fates of US military occupations that have occurred over the last century, where we have come directly up against societies that we briefly controlled and tried to steer in economically as well as socially positive directions. The occupations of Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, and Iraq came to dramatically different ends, principally due to the differing levels of ingrained beliefs and institutional development of each culture (one could add a quasi-occupation of Vietnam here as well). While Germany and Japan were each devastated by World War 2, and took decades to recover, their people had long been educated into an advanced instutional framework of economic and civic activity. Some of the devastation was indeed political and social, since the Nazis (as well as the imperial Japanese system) had set up an almost medieval (i.e. fascist) system of economic control, putting the state in charge of directing production in a cabal with leading industrialists. Yet despite all that, the elements were still in place for both nations to put their economies back together and in short order rejoin the fully developed world, in political and economic terms. How much of that was due to the individual human capital of each nation, (i.e. education in both technical and civic aspects), and how much was due to the residual organizational and institutional structures, such as impersonal legal and trade expectations, and how much due to the instructive activities of the occupying administration?

One would have to conclude that very little was due to the latter, for try as we might in Iraq and Afghanistan, their culture was not ready for full-blown modernity (elections, democracy, capitalism, rule of law, etc.) in the political-economic sense. Many of their people were ready, and the models abroad were and remain ready for application. Vast amounts of information and good will is at their disposal to build a modern state. But, alas, their real power structures were not receptive. Indeed, in Afghanistan, each warlord continued to maintain his own army, and civil war was a constant danger, until today, when a civil war is in full swing, conducted by the Taliban against a withering central state. The Taliban has historically been the only group with the wide-spread cultural support (at least in rural areas), and the ruthlessness to bring order to (most of) Afghanistan. Its coalition with the other elites is based partly on doctrinaire Islam (which all parties across the spectrum pay lip service to) and brutal / effective authoritarianism. When the US invaded, we took advantage of the few portions outside the existing power coalition, (in the north), arming them to defeat the Taliban. That was an instance of working with the existing power structures.

But replacing or reforming them was an entirely different project. The fact is that the development of modern economies took Western countries centuries, and takes even the most avid students (Taiwan, South Korea, China to a partial degree) several decades of work to retrace. North emphasizes that development from primitive to modern political-economic systems is not a given, and progress is as likely to go backward as forward, depending at each moment on the incentives of those in power. To progress, they need to see more benefit in stability and durable institutions, as opposed to their own freedom of action to threaten the other members of the coalition, keep armies, extort economic rents, etc. Only as chaos recedes, stability starts being taken for granted, and the cost of keeping armies exceeds their utility, does the calculus gradually shift. That process is fundamentally psychological- it reflects the observations and beliefs of the actors, and takes a long time, especially in a country such as Afghanistan with such a durable tradition of militarized independence and plunder.

So what should we have done, instead of dreaming that we could build, out of the existing culture and distribution of power, a women-friendly capitalist modern democracy in Afghanistan? First, we should have seen clearly at the outset that we had only two choices. First was to take over the culture root and branch, with a million soldiers. The other was to work within the culture on a practical program of reform, whose goal would have been to take them a few steps down the road from a "fragile" limited access state- where civil war is a constant threat- to a "basic" limited access state, where the elites are starting to accept some rules, and the state is stable, but still exists mostly to share out the economic pie to current power holders. Indeed the "basic" state is the only substantial social organization- all other organizations have to be created by it or affiliated with it, because any privilege worth having is jealously guarded by the state, in very personal terms.

Incidentally, the next step in North's taxonomy of states would be the mature limited access order, where laws begin to be made in a non-personal way, non-state organizations are allowed to exist more broadly, like commercial guilds, but the concepts of complete equality before the law and free access to standardized organization types has not yet been achieved. That latter would be an "open access order", which modern states occupy. There, the military is entirely under the democratic and lawful control of a central state, and the power centers that are left in the society have become more diffuse, and all willing to compete within an open, egalitarian legal framework in economic as well as political matters. It was this overall bargain that was being tested with the last administration's flirtation with an armed coup at the Capital earlier this year.

In the case of Afghanistan, there is a wild card in the form of the Taliban, which is not really a localized warlord kind of power, which can be fairly dealt out a share of the local and national economic pie. They are an amalgam of local powers from many parts of the country, plus an ideological movement, plus a pawn of Pakistan, the Gulf states, and the many other funders of fundamentalist Islam. Whatever they are, they are a power the central government has to reckon with, both via recognition and acceptance, as well as competition and strategies to blunt their power.

Above all, peace and security has always been the main goal. It is peace that moderates the need for every warlord to maintain his own army, and which nudges all the actors toward a more rule-based, regular way to harvest economic rents from the rest of the economy, and helps that economy grow. The lack of security is also the biggest calling card for the Taliban, as an organization that terrorizes the countryside and foments insecurity as its principal policy (an odd theology, one might think!). How did we do on that front? Well, not very well at all. The presence of the US and allies was in the first place an irritant. Second, our profusion of policies of reform, from poppy eradication, to women's education, to showpiece elections, to relentless, and often aimless, bombing, took our eyes off the ball, and generated ill will virtually across the spectrum. One gets the sense that Hamid Karzai was trying very hard to keep it all together in the classic pattern of a fragile state, by dealing out favors to each of the big powers across the country in a reasonably effective way, and calling out the US occasionally for its excesses. But from a modern perspective, that all looks like hopeless corruption, and we installed the next government under Ashraf Ghani which tried to step up modernist reforms without the necessary conditions of even having progressed from a fragile to a basic state, let alone to a mature state or any hint of the "doorstep conditions" of modernity that North emphasizes. This is not even to mention that we seem to have set up the central state military on an unsustainable basis, dependent on modern (foreign) hardware, expertise, and funding that were always destined to dry up eventually.

So, nation-building? Yes, absolutely. But smarter nation-building that doesn't ask too much of the society being put through the wringer. Nation-building happens in gradual steps, not all at once, not by fiat, and certainly not by imposition by outsiders (Unless we have a couple of centuries to spare, as the Normans did). Our experience with the post-world war 2 reconstructions was deeply misleading if we came away with the idea that those countries did nothing but learn at the American's knee and copy the American template, and were not themselves abundantly prepared for institutional and economic reconstruction.

• Tax evasion: our solemn duty and right.
• Defending our precious bodily fluids.
• Signs of isolation and loneliness.

Cliques of Civilizations

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", twenty five years on.

Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.

It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.

Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued.

Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.

The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.

One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.

Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.

China's sphere and local conflicts.

What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.

More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
 
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!

Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.

• Sunk costs and lost souls- Trump's enablers.
• Such as Sessions. But GOP voters are just as complicit.
• Should Australia be independent?
• Man or woman?
• The rich getting richer...
• Small steps in the right direction.

Hyperdemocracy or Oligarchy?

What can China teach the US about governance? Does it point to more democracy or less? A double book/essay review.

We are at a low point in the US democracy, with the Senate having covered itself in shame over the last week, and sure to do so again next week, courtesy of one party that is in thrall to its president. But the whole world is headed in the same direction, as rightist, "strong" leaders pop up all over, from Brazil to China. The whole idea of democracy is under threat world-wide from the a new authoritarianism, which has evolved out of the old communism and more traditional feudal arrangements. And from the lust for power generally. The US misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying so blindly to implant democracy in societies woefully traumatized and unprepared for it, followed by the appalling handling and aftermath of the Arab spring, seem to have cancelled any hope of an end to history in the form of democracy triumphant across the globe.

Two decades ago, Hugh Helco wrote a prescient jeremiad titled "Hyperdemocracy" diagnosing the ills of a shallow and ill-educated democracy in the US, titillated with constant "news" (fake and otherwise) and oversharing, but lacking true deliberation and veering towards ungovernability. One ironic consequence of everyone, every corporation, and interest group having their say is that no one can be trusted. Eventually government is bereft of the basic civic faith and common narrative that the social contract relies on. His critique was acute, but his suggested treatments were afterthoughts and the problem has amplified dramatically in recent years, with foreign countries like Russia weaponizing so-called "free speech" against us.

"For the making of public policy, hyperdemocracy presents three general problems. Policy debate occurs without deliberation. Public mobilization occurs without a public. And the public tends to distrust everything that is said. " "... good policy argumentation is bad political management"

A book relevant to the question came out in 2013, from billionarie Nicolas Berggruen, who argues in Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century that some sort of convergence between the non-democratic methods of China and our rather chaotic and hyperdemocratic methods is called for, to merge China's effectiveness in public management with our respect (such as it still is) for individual rights and democratic legitimacy. Berggruen has set up a series of vanity foundations and Davos-like talk shops to solve the problems of Europe, the world, and California. The solutions focus on meritocracy- trying to insulate decision makers from the political winds by appointing Berggruen's friends to influential commissions and special bodies that would advise the politicians who may not benefit from proper think-tank training. For California, his solutions ended up recommending taxing the poor more and the rich less- which says alot about his version of meritocracy.

Nevertheless, these arguments raise interesting questions at this perilous time. Does being in a hyperdemocracy mean that we have too much democracy and deserve less? Or do we really live in a hyperdemocracy at all? And does China have some kind of secret sauce for public management and institutional far-sightedness and continuity that we could learn from, seeing as they are a rising power with confidence and in some cases, outstanding public services? I think hyperdemocracy is a bit of a misnomer, since it is hardly an acceleration of democracy to replace reasoned discourse with propaganda and corporate interests, and to give up our politicians to utter corruption. The lack of a civil and civic discourse formed around truth and mutual respect is an unmitigated disaster, not some hyper form of democracy. The fact that Facebook allows those with money and psychological skills of a nefarious or pathological nature to implant viral falsities into our body politic is not "democracy", or "free speech", but is abdication of the most basic role of publishing- that of standing behind what you publish and standing for a level of discourse that befits our culture.

The fact is the America is hardly even a democracy at this point. The public routinely stands behind significant public policy advances that are as routinely stymied by a minority that is funded by rich ideologues, both directly through political corruption and through myriad propaganda outlets. Far from a hyperdemocracy, we live in a oligarchy, one that is slowly morphing into an even more concentrated fascist regime before our eyes. The convergence is taking place, but not in a good or intended way.

A high-speed train to nowhere. California's rail plan is in crisis.

So the prescriptions that Berggruen touts, allowing that they were authored before our current administration, hardly meet the crisis of our times. Yes, we need more competent public administration. Just look at California's high speed train fiasco, and its public pensions crisis. Yes, we need longer-term strategic thinking. But the elites that have been serving us over the last couple of decades have not done such a good job, particularly from Republican administrations. Where have the truly momentous foreign policy disasters come from? Where has the denial of climate change come from? From one region in our political spectrum. And that is no accident, being the region that has antidemocratic tendencies, and seems dedicated to some sort of aristocracy of class and money. Replacing it with a slightly more centrist aristocracy of class and money, with an intellectual patina, is not likely to alter our course very much.

Berggruen proposes an ideal republic that is extremely indirect, such that a small community of a few thousand people elect ten representatives, and then those representatives elect a next level that represents about 100,000 people, and they elect another body, and so forth until the top layer of some kind of president or council is elected in a pyramid of representation that is four levels deep. This hearkens back to what the American founders were trying to accomplish with their indirect elections of Senators, and the electoral collage for the Presidential election. But then later in the book, he bemoans the out-of-touch-ness of the European administration in Brussels, which has so little democratic legitimacy. It is a curious conflict in a book full of them, and of airy ideas.

Nevertheless, the idea of a more vibrant local politics is a very important one. We are overly focused on national politics, about which the average person can do nothing but get upset. Voting is great, but participation is better, in face-to-face settings. One way to enable this is to mandate one day per month holiday for political functions. This could include voting, but also encompass neighborhood meetings, town council events, etc. The way our culture values work over civic obligations and participation is extremely unbalanced. Participation would not be manadatory, but all levels of government would obligated to open their doors, hold relevant meetings on these days, and foster public participation.

Secondly, the idea of some insulation from the political winds is also important, for many policy makers, particularly those oriented towards the long-term. Berggruen points to institutions like the Federal Reserve, the civil service, and many other regulatory bodies, which have purposefully been separated from the political fray in a way that balances accountability with the freedom to think calmly and for the long-term. We should have more such bodies, even perhaps modeled on the 5-year plan system of China, to think carefully about our future infrastructure, our future social policies, and our future politics. The state of California could certainly use a bit more organized foresight, which used to be provided by business leaders like Leland Stanford, but now is more likely to be corrupted by business than served by it.

Berggruen bemoans the state of the California referendum system, originally a gem of democracy, which has been captured by business interests which regularly compete against each other in offering rival propositions which are engineered to sound as anodyne and contrary to their actual intent as possible. Here there is an easy solution, which is to outlaw paying people to collect signatures. The currency of the referendum system is signatures, and collecting them is arduous. No one would do so unless they either cared a great deal about the issue or were well paid.

Lastly, there is the media (leaving out general corruption, which can be addressed by public financing of elections and prohibitions on corporate meddling in political affairs). Here we get to the to a truly difficult issue- how to re-establish a shared culture of truth and civic pride from our dispirited current state of Twitted discourse. Here we could learn a few lessons, not from China, but from Europe, which carefully, but legally, disables some extreme forms of speech to set guardrails on the society. We might consider making false claims grounds for suit and penalty, (proportionate to the audience), not only in commercial speech where this is already the case, but in political and policy speech. Propaganda outlets like FOX are a cancer on the Republic, that trade in lies as the foundation of their bizarre narratives. Block the lies, and the narratives are much more difficult to maintain. This is very fraught policy to propose, as our largely free speech standard has served the US quite well most of our history, (excepting several phases of extremely partisan presses), and any kind of censorship can be twisted to nafarious purposes. But this legal standard would not be enforced in some star chamber, rather in open court, presumably with evidence, experts, scholarly apparatus, etc. There is far more to do to re-establish a productive fourth estate, which is such a crucial participant in a functioning democracy, but the truth is one place to start.

Our problems cry out for reform, not revolution. Our democracy is under extreme pressure, but has not yet broken down completely. It is an index of our problems that Democrats need typically to find the perfect candidate, pristine in speech and spotless in record and demeanor, in order to have any hope of winning, while Republicans can put up virtually any grifter or mysogyinst with a fair chance of success. It is a reflection of the unfairness of our current system, ridden as it is with dark money in the service of extreme and retrograde ideologies. But there is hope, especially in demographic change, that California, dysfunctional though it may be in many ways, represents the imploded future of the Republican party, which would unleash enormous energies for national reform, towards a democratic, not an oligarchic, future.

• Delete everything: the new normal in corporate obstruction of justice.
• An update from Mr. Sloth.
• Oh, the perils of crime.
• When grifters are in charge.
• Guess who cashes in on climate change?

Russia and its Sphere of Influence

What happens if no one wants to be in your club? Review of "Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the rest", by Angela Stent.

History plods on, despite our pride in having achieved "modernity", so that everything can now stop and rest at our state of perfection. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Russia, where the past weighs heavily, affecting attitudes and policy in substantial contrast to interests and current conditions. Russia has been an imperial power for centuries, gradually beating most of its neighbors into submission and incorporating them into a multi-ethnic but hardly socially equal empire. This process was capped by the Great Patriotic War, aka World War 2, which ended with the USSR in control of new territories inside Europe, and others inside Japan, and with ideological friends in many other lands. It was not a happy empire, but it was a huge one, and the Russians were and remain proud of its achievement.

Then everything fell apart, and since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been trying to get it back. That would be a brief synopsis of Stent's book, which goes in very professional fashion through Russia's history, current relations, conflicts, and friendships all over the world. On the whole, Russia has over the last couple of decades managed its relations quite well, leveraging what little strength it has (lots of oil and gas, a ruthless attitude towards politics near and far, and a prodigious ability to suffer) into substantial strides back to relevance on the world stage.

But what should the West think and do about it? We came in for a great deal of criticism for our cavalier attitude during the breakup of the USSR. We advocated "shock therapy", and boy were they shocked! Without effective state control or cultural traditions of capitalism, what was a rotten system of communism turned into a laissez-faire wild west of rampant economic and political corruption. State control has now been re-asserted, but the patterns that formed in those days, which frankly reflect a long history of "informal" political relations throughout the region, persist to this day, despite verying formalities of democracy and rule of law. There remains a fundamental misunderstanding (and mistrust) of what political and economic liberalism means and how the West has gotten to its dominant position, despite centuries of study, copying, inferiority complexes, and deep economic and political relations. Russia remains instinctively authoritarian, not only due to the cleverness of Vladimir Putin, but apparently as a general cultural default. Maybe this did not have to be, maybe there was an opening in the early days of Yeltsin's rule, but our thoughtless and disastrous prescriptions at the time helped sow a bitter harvest. Now Russia equates democracy with weakness, and has decided to demonstrate that principle by deploying its most expert propaganda into our free media spaces.

It is generally realized now that China, in contrast, did things correctly, becoming a booming capitalist state while keeping absolute political control. That is how an properly authoritarian state manages things, (as previously modeled by various Asian tigers, particularly Singapore), and is now a model for Russia among many others. Unlike the Russian breakdown, China's ability to change its spots from communism to capitalism raises deep questions of whether liberalism and democracy are the best system, not only in human rights terms, but in their ability to manage capitalism. For it is clear, from both the Russian debacle and from the Chinese success, that capitalism is not self-perpetuating or self-managing. It relies inextricably on a strong state and legal system that sets rules by which competition among oligarchs, firms, workers, and other actors remains on the economic level, not on the military, political, or criminal levels. Democracy can be responsive to these issues, but we are, in the US, currently in the grip of a very destructive ideology that denigrates the state, is restoring corruption at all levels, and appears heedless of the future in economic, political, and planetary terms. The outcomes of this ideology became frighteningly apparent in our chaotic occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the lesson may still not have been learned.

But getting back to Russia ... The nations of the former USSR have developed in almost linear relation to how closely they are positioned to Europe, geographically and culturally. The Baltic states turned relatively easily and completely to the European model. The middle area of Romania and Bulgaria, among others, have turned more slowly, but are also firmly in the pro-Europe camp. But those bordering Russia, like Belarus out east to Kazakstan, remain authoritarian and mired in "informal relations". Ukraine has tried to buck this trend and is deeply divided. Partly this is due to the large number of expatriate Russians living in these areas. But in any case, each has its own nationalism, and no one wants to re-unite with Russia to remake the old empire. Recent news stories show that even Belarus, Russia's most reliable and sycophantic ally, draws a line.

"Ultimately, Russia, China, and the states of Central Asia share fundamental ideas of what stability in the region looks like and how to maintain it. They are a group of authoritarian states dedicated to maintaining themselves in power and ensuring no Islamist or color revolutions threaten their rule. Whereas they view with great suspicion any Western attempts to open up their societies, Central Asian elites welcome Russian and Chinese support of the status quo."

So Russia is determined to have a club that few want to join. The ex-Soviet republics may share many cultural, political, and economic patterns, and cooperate to some extent in organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but Russia's dreams of expansion and re-integration are generally rebuffed. It has turned to invasions like the takeover of Crimea, South Ossetia, and the creeping war in Eastern Ukraine, treating its neighbors like piñatas to be whacked at will and bullied with fossil fuel subsidies and threats. It is reminiscent of the spoiler role Pakistan maintains in its region, fomenting unrest in Afghanistan lest that country ever have peace and positive economic development.

And then Russia demands that we all respect its "sphere of influence", as though we were still in Victorian times, playing some sort of great game on a map of the world, and heading in to World War 1. But this supposed sphere is entirely composed of unwilling and oppressed neighbors- not quite as badly treated as in Soviet times, but uniformly uninterested in recreating those glory days. Russia has no intrinsic or deserved "rights" in this respect, despite its vaunting desires- we need to keep offering self-determination and choice to its neighbors, as we do to all other countries around the world. Russia is armed to the teeth, and really needs no defensive buffer of this kind, nor is its cultural influence so positive that its bullying should be regarded as a family matter. Quite the opposite.

NATO countries of Europe, in blue.

Which brings us to NATO. We did not think through its fate very carefully when the cold war ended. NATO stood during the cold war as a defense against the USSR, pure and simple, plus a way to keep Germany pacified and integrated in Europe. When the USSR collapsed (foremost because its captive nationalities and "republics" wanted out), and the Warsaw pact dissolved, we half-heartedly offered coordination to Russia. But never really thought through what our military posture should be towards this new friend, or offered a comprehensive and durable peace. We were, however, eager to integrate as many of the newly ex-Soviet states as wanted to join, such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, not to mention various members of the former Yugoslavia. That makes it look like a rather offensive affair, from Russia's perspective. And then Ukraine wanted to join as well. Integrating all these countries into a modern mutual defence organization was certainly positive for them, as one more element of their cultural headlong run away from Russia and communism.

But what is it really defending? One gets the distinct sense that, like in the post-WW2 era, NATO's purpose has become keeping the principal adversary of the latest war at bay. But whereas Germany was integrated into NATO, subject to continued occupation, though of a relatively friendly sort, now the enemy, i.e. Russia, is outside, and is not being killed with kindness, but rather being provoked by encirclement. All this is relatively obvious and not terribly objectionable now, now that Russia has become increasingly anti-Western, but that did not have to be the outcome. (Though Stent is dubious- she maintains that Russia's historical attitude strongly re-asserted itself after the breakup, and it would be chimerical to think that Russia would ever align fully with the West, such as joining NATO and allowing extensive occupation / collaboration by foreign forces- see the quote below) We drifted into it by inertia- by lazy thinking in our foreign policy and military establishments, not to say simple gloating. Would Russia have responded more positively if we had given them a better deal? Only if we had matched it with more effective economic reconstruction assistance as well. But neither of these things happened, and attitudes in Russia quickly hardened and became, understandably, rather bitter. Nevertheless, this does not justify an undeserved sphere of influence or renascent empire on Russia's part. Does Britain demand a sphere over France? Does Germany over Denmark? No. Did we invade Cuba when it turned to communism? Well, sort of and half-heartedly(!)

"As Putin consolidated his rule, it became clear to much of the world that a main reason for Russian's rejection of Western-style economic and political programs was because they are Russians, not because they were communists. Seventy years ago, George Kennan understood that communist ideology reinforced and exacerbated, but did not contradict, the characteristics of traditional tsarist rule. Communism had been superimposed on centuries of Russian autocracy and personalistic rule, and had, if anything, strengthened those traditions. The ideology was a means to consolidate the Bolsheviks' rule, mobilize society, and, with great pain, drag Russian peasants into modernity. ... The minority who supported Gorbachev and Yeltsin and believed that Russia should become more like the West both politically and economically, were outnumbered from the outset."

Reading this book reinforces that it is the US and the West in general that is the revolutionary agent afoot in the world. We are the ones fomenting color revolutions. We are the ones planting thoughts of human rights, rule of law, justice, and prosperity around the world. We think that all this is obvious, progressive, and unexceptional, but democracies are still the minority, and the other countries, notably including Russia and China, have developed a countervailing authoritarian bloc who studiously refrain from criticizing each other's miserable internal politics, and complain ceaselessly about those who do.

Democracy Index, with darker green denoting greater democracy. Note how China rates slightly higher than Russia, due to its better governance and more functional political culture, despite lacking any electoral process.

Are we right to do so? The issue of self-determination is perhaps the thorniest area where this ideology hits the real world- not everyone can or should have their own country. The USSR broke up over the failure of the center to, in the face of countless failures, justify holding on to its huge empire, and has now turned into 15 successor states, most with an ethnic character. Several of those successor states have experienced civil wars and separatist movements of their own. The fact is that few large countries have ever become large by voluntary means. Given generally peaceful conditions, most peoples with any kind of distinct culture want their own country, as is being expressed in such places as Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, Kurdistan, and even 150 years ago in our own Confederate South. As Stent acidly points out, separatism is Russia's (and China's) bête noir, leading to its brutal repression of Chechnya, among many other places ... until it comes to Ukraine and Georgia, where Russia uses separatism in the most cynical way.

"Russia will push to jettison the post-Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order driven by the US and Europe in favor of a post-West order. For Russia, this order would resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers, with China, Russia, and the United States dividing the worlds into spheres of influence."

But there was one place that had a "velvet divorce". Slovakia and the Czech Republic parted ways without bloodshed, because they were oriented to the European model, and negotiated their differences. As a foreign policy stance, we should not encourage separatism generally, but should always support peaceful resolutions and reasonable accommodations. One might add in passing that, if one holds an election to validate a minority breaking away, referendums of this sort should have a high bar, such as 75% , rather than the typical 50%. At any rate, this episode illustrates a key point- that the Western model is good, and tends to lead to peaceful and durable outcomes, because it is not repressive and takes people's interests and rights seriously. Repression can keep the peace for a while, but durable, prosperous peace (and good governance) is best kept with respect, moderation, and truthful communication.

So the order of preference, from all these historical lessons, is as follows. The worst government is none, representing chaos and unleashing the worst forms of power- criminal and informal military. The next best is authoritarian, which can range from brutally repressive, like Stalinist Russia, to repressive and even quite functional, if not benevolent, like China, Turkey, and Russia today. And the best is liberal (and functional!) democracy, which respects its citizens while maintaining a strong state. Unfortunately, democracies are difficult to run, have various inefficiencies, and are perpetually at risk of turning to authoritarianism, particularly when new technologies of propaganda arise that can hypnotize and misinform the populace, as happened during the fascist era, and is happening again today.

Does this mean that we should agitate for democracy everywhere and all the time? Yes, in short, it does. We can and must work with all governments as they exist, to manage what interests we have in common. But we should never mistake our instrumental relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China for true friendship and ideological compatibility. We need to keep our eyes on the interests of people across the world now and into the future, which are uniformly best served by freedom and democracy, with strong and effective states founded on the active participation and decisive decision-making by their citizens. Authoritarianism can be an effective form of government, and sometimes a stepping stone to better conditions. But it is not a desirable end-point, and nor is its correlate, a spheres-of-influence world. And who knows? Maybe one of the democracies that we encourage will someday be in a position to save us in turn.

• One view of Russia's tangles with the West.
• Russia's "productive" role in Syria.
• What are the prospects for democracy in poor countries? Dim, but possible.
• Will Russia save the world?
• The toxic legacy of gerrymandering. And of Citizens United.
• Our tax law becomes even more corrupted.
• War has been declared.

Thomas Paine

Target of more than one early American smear campaign. Review of "The life of Thomas Paine", vols 1 and 2.

For an immensely talented, intelligent, and well-meaning man, Thomas Paine had remarkably bad luck at several key junctures of his life. The first was in marriage. No one knows what happened, but he and his wife quickly separated, more or less amicably, leading in part to his desire to move the American Colonies from his native England. Next was in his business dealings. He was not in the least a man of business, and gave away all his writings. This helped make them popular, but left him ultimately penniless. And the little money he had, he gave away freely. Lastly were his political problems in France and with enemies from the American Revolution, which landed him in prison during the French Revolution, and within a hair's breadth of the guillotine.

But he was very fortunate in his biographer, Moncure Conway, who published "The Life of Thomas Paine" in 1892, when lore and records about Paine were still reasonably fresh. Conway was a free-thinker, with deep sympathy with his subject, and this book is as detailed and supportive a biography as one might wish. We all know that Paine published "Common Sense", which cast the arguments for the American revolution in clear, populist language and sparked the national resolve to leave the British empire. He also published a series of follow-up pamphlets during the war, which he served as a foot soldier in Washington's army, that had equally important roles in supporting and funding the war effort, which was continually on the verge of financial and military collapse.

Paine was also an inventor, obsessed with building better bridges, using the improved forms of iron available at the time. This pursuit brought him back to England briefly, where he wrote "Rights of Man", as a response to Edmund Burke's somewhat reactionary "Reflections on the Revolution in France". "Rights of Man" was a comprehensive wrecking ball against monarchichal rule, and was very popular both in England and France. For this, the British government carried out an extensive campaign of villification, prosecuting him for sedition and libel. Paine escaped capture in just the nick of time, crossing the channel and entering France as a hero, feted with parades, and immediately elected to the National Convention.

There, he co-authored a constitution, whose fate illuminates those of the French Revolution in general, and Paine in particular. The National Convention was supposedly a temporary body, empowered, as were the American Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention, to manage transitional affairs (at first, in France, in collaboration with the king), and to come up with a new constitution. But as crisis piled on crisis, the Convention split into parties- the Girondins and the Montagnards- the latter of whom decided that they didn't need a constitution anyhow, and could rule directly via revolutionary committees. The constitution was scuttled, rule of law went out the window, and the Montagnards, under Robespierre, proceeded to the Terror.

The most interesting and revelatory part of Conway's biography is his detailed account of how Thomas Paine ended up in prison. As a Girondin, and having argued forcefully against executing the king, Paine was definitely on the political outs. The Montagnards soon barred foreigners from serving in the Convention, depriving Paine of his seat. But why send him to prison in December 1793? Here we come to the machinations of the American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris. Morris is portrayed as a semi-Tory, supportive of George Washington's nascent reapproachment with Britain, which was consummated in the Jay Treaty of 1795. (Whose fruits would later arrive in the war of 1812.)

Unbeknownst to Paine, Morris also had personal enmities against Paine, who was the most famous and leading American in Paris, functioning in many ways as America's main envoy. The French government sought to remove Morris as ambassador, due to his pro-British, royalist sympathies, but were rebuffed by Washington, helped along by various misreprentations and lies from Morris. This left the French in an awkward position, vis-a-vis their only ally in the world, at which point they started listening to Morris and doing his bidding. And Conway strongly suggests that Morris let it be known at this point that the US would like Paine to be imprisoned, due to insinuations that Paine was a British citizen, a thorn to the Americans, and that Paine had encouraged the activities of the French ambassador to the US, Edmund Genet, who had angered Washington (and his sponsors in the Convention) by organizing pro-French millitias in the US to harry the Spanish in Florida, harass British shipping, and generally encourage party strife, among other vexations.

Conway puts Morris in the center of a plot to imprison, and preferably execute, Thomas Paine, of which just a couple of samples:

"But the fatal far-reaching falsehood of Morris' letter to Jefferson was his assertion that he had claimed Paine as an American. This falsehood, told to Washington, Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, paralyzed all action in America in Paine's behalf; told to the Americans in Paris, it paralyzed further effort of their own."
...
"It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game. But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793. In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: 'By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost .you more in postage than they are worth.' I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy."
...
"Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting, for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, assured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, .they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution, would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine."

Paine was eventually freed by the next minister, James Monroe, whom Morris did everything in his power to impede. Monroe claimed Paine as an American Citizen, and that was that. Morris, for his part, escaped in 1794 across the border to Switzerland after getting embroiled in various plots in Paris and becoming even more non-grata than before, and wound up his career in Europe as a royal toady, as Conway puts it: "The ex-Minister went off to play courtier to George III and write for Louis XVIII the despotic proclamation with which monarchy was to be restored in France."

Paine's final landmark work was "Age of Reason", his defense of deism. This led to the most thorough campaign of villification of his life, and long after. What was to the aristocrats of his day and particularly of the American Revolution a common philosophy became in Paine's treatment a popular and populist attack on established religions of all sorts, and the sanctity and veracity of the Bible in particular. Paine derided its fables and contradictions, and proclaimed a simple faith in god, whose evident works were plenty to engender belief, with no need for thrice-told miracles or gold-embroidered priests. While twenty or thirty years before, such a work might have been taken in the revolutionary spirit, America had fallen into a revivalist spirit by this time, and the resurgent methodists and other preachers led a campaign that blackened Paine's reputation for decades, and from which it has only gradually and partially emerged.

One wonders what the Quaker Paine would have made of his religion after Darwin and Lyell, who so thoroughly demolished the deistic reliance on god to explain the most far-reaching and perplexing natural phenomena. I am confident that Paine's intellect, which shines through his writing, would have grappled honestly with these changed circumstances and come out with either a far-attenuated deism, or given it up in favor of full atheism.

• There are many authoritarian institutions in our country.
• It is hard to negotiate with the Taliban.

Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?