Failure to Think, Episode 1

Like it says on the tin, I think about stuff. Also, I get unreasonably irritated when people with whom I might otherwise agree fail to do so. Today's exhibit, therefore, is entitled "How to Be Smarter than Marjorie Taylor Greene." 

Greene has been in the news lately because she's facing a hearing, in which various activists are trying to get her disqualified from running for Congress again. I've heard various people, including some NPR folks who ought to know better, who sound like they're practically salivating at the the thought.

I yield to nobody in my distaste for Marjorie Taylor Greene. But . . . let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the highly improbable has happened. Greene has lost the case, she's lost the appeals, she's been thrown out of office, she can never run for federal office again. Liberals get everything they dreamed of and more.

Now what?

What about the 229,827 voters who supported her in 2020? Are they suddenly going to see the light? Will we find them holding hands with Black Lives Matter activists, singing "Kumbaya" and peacing out on weed?

No. We will not.

If Marjorie Taylor Greene's supporters can't vote for her, they'll vote for someone else just like her. And if they can't vote for someone else just like her, they'll vote for someone worse. By getting rid of Greene, you have accomplished precisely one thing: you've confirmed her supporters in their strongest (and most destructive) beliefs. 

The problem isn't Greene. The problem isn't even that 229,827 people voted for Greene. The problem is that nobody is making any effort to provide those 229,827 people with an affirmative reason not to vote for Greene. Democrats seem to think they can just go in front of those voters and say "See? You're wrong about everything!" and then We will win and They will lose and everything will be OK again. 

Uh-huh. Sure. 

Let me know when the magic sparkly unicorns come flying down, too.

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P.S. I will continue to point out that my own record as a prognosticator isn't bad.

 

Book Review: Capitalism in America

Capitalism in America: A History
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
Economics, history

Capitalism: Alan Greenspan is for it!

No, that's not the whole review. For the first half of Capitalism in America I thought that it might be, though. That's the half that's purely descriptive. It's stuffed full of statistics, sure enough, and not badly written, but it's a fairly standard economic history of the U.S. into the early 20th century. I already knew that railroads were important, that slavery was bad, that Standard Oil was big; Capitalism in America added only some numbers to my knowledge, which I have since largely forgotten.

The book gets more interesting when the authors finally start constructing an argument, instead of a play-by-play. Thank the reformers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who put the brakes on the laissez-faire free-for-all. Greenspan and Wooldridge have to come to grips with what they did, which forces them to assess the system's successes and failures. The result is a pretty good argument for capitalism, broadly speaking, as an engine for innovation and as a proven way of lifting people out of poverty.

That's not to say that I think their analysis is a complete success. On the contrary, I think it's open to some fairly serious criticism. For example, Capitalism in America rightly contains some ringing denunciations of the slave economy. Good for you, gentlemen! But nowhere--literally nowhere--does it acknowledge that this country's 19th-century prosperity was based on spending down a metaphorical trust fund, consisting of land that had been looted from its native inhabitants. It's easy to make one group (white settlers) prosperous by making another group (Native Americans) poor. How much should we credit that to the success of capitalism vs. the profits of theft? Greenspan and Wooldridge are silent.

Similarly, G&W are decidedly . . . let's say "myopic" . . . when it comes to their critique of the New Deal. They make a fuss, several times over, about the fact that the New Deal recovery under FDR was interrupted by a second downturn in 1937. They do not see fit to mention that many other economists blame that downturn on FDR's premature decision to end a lot of New Deal spending in favor of balancing the budget. They also fall into the classic trap of saying that "It wasn't government spending that ended the Depression; it was World War II." Okay, and World War II did this how? Hint: who paid for all of those tanks, airplanes, salaries, jeeps, Liberty Ships, prophylactics, bullets, cans of Spam, uniforms, etc.? Could it have been the U.S. government? Why, I believe it could!

Perhaps the most telling small indicator of this myopia comes near the very end of Capitalism in America. "There were good reasons for complaining" about the effects of industrial capitalism, the authors concede. . "Deaths from industrial accidents in Pittsburgh per 100,000 residents almost doubled . . . between 1870 and 1900." Then, in the very next sentence, "Politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson whipped up all this discontent into successful political movements" (emphasis added). Note that verb phrase. Now, "whipped up" is a dismissive phrase. The strong implication is that those people who were complaining about the doubling of the death rate were a bunch of slow-witted hoi polloi malcontents, who--instead of being property grateful for the beneficence of their betters--were so crass as to actually agitate for a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The nerve! What right did they have to interfere with the process of accumulating wealth, by questioning the purposes for which the wealth was accumulated?

What's particularly ironic is that it's a version of an argument that southern slaveholders used. Chattel slavery (they avowed) made the country richer as a whole. If some people were the losers in that process, well, too bad for them. Greenspan and Wooldridge would surely have no truck with that version of history; but when it comes to more recent developments they are blind to the parallel.

In the end, Capitalism in America is what I'd call tactically convincing. Its final argument--in favor of "creative destruction" (a cliche that the book rather overuses), and against the growth in entitlements and regulation--is well put, and well-supported by facts. I'm not unsympathetic. It's easy to close the book thinking, "well, that makes sense." But I've read other books that take the same facts, put a different slant on them, and evoke the same reaction towards a quite different set of policies. It's worth reading, but not worth accepting uncritically.

---

One of the best books on finance out there is Liaquat Ahamed's The Lords of Finance, focusing specifically on the role of central bankers and the gold standard in bringing on the Great Depression. Broader, and also excellent, is Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes/Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.

Also, G&W refer several times to Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands. I didn't like the latter book much, but I have to say that future historians could be pardoned for thinking that it was describing a completely different country than the one in Capitalism in America. 

Book Review: On Grand Strategy

On Grand Strategy
John Lewis Gaddis
History, politics, warfare

It's not often that I have a hard time describing my reaction to a book. On Grand Strategy is not exactly a military-history book, not exactly a philosophy book (in spite of heavily referencing Isaiah Berlin), not exactly a political-theory book, not exactly a descriptive book, not exactly a prescriptive book, not exactly an analytical book. I'm not entirely sure who the intended audience is, in fact; it's too popular to appeal to academics, and too academic to appeal to the public. Smart undergraduates, maybe?

Gaddis's thesis is that large scale strategy--whether political, military, economic, or what have you--is always a balancing process. If you fix your eyes on your ultimate ambition, you can lose sight of the practical necessities. If you keep your mind firmly on what's realistically achievable, you can narrow your vision to the point where you don't actually achieve much. Aspirations can be limitless; resources can't; to engage in grand strategy is to establish a meeting point. Or, in Berlin's famous formula, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

To this end, the book proceeds largely as a series of parallel lives. Usually Gaddis picks out one historical personage who failed to negotiate this balancing act, and contrasts him with another one (either a contemporary, or someone else in a similar situation) who succeeded. These case studies are interesting, but they don't add up to a conclusion. That the tension cited exists is plain; a series of examples doesn't constitute any kind of explanation, much less a theory. Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, for instance, was obviously a prisoner of his ambitious ends. He didn't compromise on his means, and so his ends went unachieved. Okay, true. And . . . ?

The real weakness, to put it another was, is that it's all hindsight. Given a taxonomy and 20-20 postdiction, it's always easy to fit your cases into your structure. Whether that really explains anything, much less accurately reflects how the real historical figures thought or worked or acted, is a much more doubtful question.

I should stipulate that there's much to admire in On Grand Strategy. The scholarship is deep, wide, and erudite. The writing is quite fluid. The content is intellectually challenging, ambitious, and thought-provoking. All the same, when you write a thick book that effectively boils down to "good leaders know how to match means and ends," you haven't quite fulfilled your promises.

Book Review: The Poison Squad

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Deborah Blum
Biography, science, politics

In 2010, Deborah Blum published an excellent book entitled The Poisoner's Handbook. The Poison Squad is in many ways a sequel, or para-quel. Unfortunately, the comparison doesn't work in the current book's favor. In The Poison Squad, Blum slips over the line from writer to cheerleader.

The book is centered strongly on Dr. Harvey Wiley, "Father of the FDA". That in itself is a good choice; Wiley was a remarkable character, and provides a unifying thread. However, Blum makes a dreadful choice in her presentation of facts: a reader of The Poison Squad could be pardoned for concluding that everything that Dr. Wiley said, did, or proposed was absolutely righteous, because it was Dr. Wiley saying, doing, or proposing it.

This is nonsense. However well-intentioned Wiley was, and however nefarious his adversaries--and some were pretty nefarious!--he was not a prophet. The eponymous Poison Squad studies were far better than the previous standard, which consisted of nothing; but they would be laughed out of court today, due to tiny sample sizes and a lack of rigor. To use the existence of those studies to support their conclusions is absurd--but Blum does it, over and over. In no case does she even refer even glancingly to the actual, you know, currently-accepted facts. No: Dr. Wiley was always right, and his foes were always wrong (and not just wrong, but EEEVIL).

Blum likes horror stories. She flings around the fact that formaldehyde was used as a food additive like a mad card sharp pulling aces out of her sleeves, apparently because the phrase "formaldehyde in food!!!!" is a scary phrase. She doesn't mention that formaldehyde occurs naturally in some foods, much less give us meaningful facts by which we could compare quantities or make reasoned judgments. She kicks up Wiley-quotin' storm on the terror that is sodium benzoate, but does she include anything like Science Magazine's commentary on the stuff? I'll give you one guess. (Hint: Science uses the terms "idiotic", "stupid", and "Your reasoning is faulty and your science is wrong".) 

At several points Blum's text reads like the "arguments" of today's anti-vaccine zealots. That is not a compliment.

Blum really shows her colors in a rather bad afterword. Here she tries to connect Saint Harvey Wiley to global warming, the Trump Administration, the heartbreak of psoriasis, etc. (Okay, I made that last one up.) This is not only off-putting; it shouldn't be necessary. If Blum had written her book better, she could have--should have--trusted her readers to make the connections for themselves. Instead, the addendum just looks like more frothing and propaganda.

---

A pretty good book covering some related topics (among many others) is Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit.

Book Review: The Square and the Tower

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook
Niall Ferguson
History, politics

I've liked some of Ferguson's previous books, particularly The Ascent of Money, but The Square and the Tower is too long for its content. The first portion, describing some of the basics of network theory, is interesting but largely disconnected from the remainder. Said remainder consists of sweepingly vague statements, interspersed among a plethora of fairly unremarkable examples, delivered in orotund (read: pompous) prose. Also, Ferguson wastes chapters delivering long, thunderous denunciations of things that everybody is already against. (Apparently Stalinism and Islamic terrorism are both Bad Things. Who knew?)

A title like this begs for a strong theoretical spine. What we get is a monologue to the effect that there are networks, and there are hierarchies, and here are some examples of each. At 592 pages, that's a lot of book for a very unremarkable observation.

Essay: What Trump Voters Got Right

I am not a Donald Trump enthusiast. I do, however, think it's useful to assess Trumpism in an analytical, detached fashion (blame this guy), as opposed to the hyper-partisan mode of . . . well . . . everyone else. Trumpism is not an inexplicable force of nature. Further, while there are bad people among Trump voters, they are not universally bad, nor does it follow that they are all wrong about everything.

I think Trump voters are reacting--at least some of them, some of the time--to a genuine problem. I don't think they've chosen a good solution, but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't there. Specifically:

• The system is in need of radical (in the sense of Latin radix, "root") reform.
• The system is designed to make radical reform impossible.

Rather than going into a long exegesis here, let me instead offer up a case-in-point: my particular bête noire, the extension of Boston's Green Line to Somerville.

• The project been legally mandated since 1990.
• The MBTA already owns the right-of-way, which runs alongside the commuter rail tracks.
• It's supported by virtually everybody.
• It doesn't require any tunnels or complex engineering.
• It's even genuinely useful.

The line is 4.7 miles long. In the 9,944 days since December 31, 1990, the amount of track that has been laid along that 4.7 miles is zero feet, zero inches. If I could snap my fingers and have the line completed overnight, the average rate of construction would have been just about thirty inches per day. 

Of course, the line won't be completed overnight. After the MBTA fired its original contractor, it took them 23 months just to name a replacement. Naturally, no work whatsoever happened in the interim.

Consider that from 1863 to 1869 this country built a railroad from Omaha to Sacramento using black powder, mules, and human muscles. Obviously things were a lot different there and then, and there was both enormous waste and grave injustice involved . . . but still. In six years, the Pacific Railroad laid 1,868 miles of track. In the six years since the so-called "ground-breaking" of the Green Line extension, we've paid a lot of money for virtually nothing.

Multiply that by all the things that the federal and state governments do, and you get the kind of institutional sclerosis that lets the nationalist populist authoritarians take over.

By the way, I think my prognostications here were pretty accurate. Just saying.

Book Review: The Wizard and the Prophet

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
Charles C. Mann
Science, biography, ecology, philosophy, politics

[DISCLAIMER: Charles C. Mann graduated from my alma mater and lives in my home town. I don't think we've ever met, but it would be surprising if we didn't have connections in common.]

It's quite likely that The Wizard and the Prophet will be my favorite book of 2018.

Here's the core of the matter: in thirty years, the world will have ten billion people. Should we:

• Make wise use of our existing resources, conserving and cutting back as necessary, in order to minimize the damage we cause to ourselves and our planet? That's the "Prophet" response, exemplified in Mann's book by the early ecologist William Vogt.
• Innovate, adapt, embracing creativity and dynamic capitalism, in order to expand the carrying capacity of the world and lift more people out of poverty? That's the "Wizard" response, as espoused by Norman Borlaug--a man who won a Nobel Peace Prize as the father of the so-called "Green Revolution".

From this deceptively simple opposition Charles Mann spins out an amazing story. It's a parallel biography of two extraordinary men--and then some. It looks at both approaches in detail, examining the different answers that each of them would give to a wide variety of looming problems: climate change, hunger, clean water, pollution, and so forth. The writing is fluid and beautifully structured; I read the book in about two days.

Most importantly, Mann is scrupulously fair towards both Wizards and Prophets. He presents each sides's arguments fairly and in their best lights, and then presents the other side's critique with equal insight. That lifts the book up from "enjoyable" to "important". These are big ideas, and they are consequential. How we think about them will have a profound effect on life on earth--within our lifetimes.

It subtracts nothing from Mann's wonderful book to point out that the dichotomy he points out is an artificial one. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing": Prophets and Wizards are hedgehogs, but the answer probably lies with the foxes. It's true that we should waste less, decentralize our electrical grid, be skeptical of claims that innovation will inevitably save us. It's also true that innovation has produced miracles, that more people are living better now than ever before, that the doomsayers have hitherto been wrong. We should recognize both truths.

---

Related books worth reading are Gretchen Bakke's The Grid, Rose George's The Big Necessity, and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City. Mann's own 1491 and 1493, though unrelated, are also good.

Book Review: Churchill and Orwell

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
Thomas E. Ricks
Biography

Churchill and Orwell is an audacious attempt at an interleaved dual intellectual biography, showing the parallels and cross-connections not just of its two subjects' lives, but of their thoughts. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it's a worthwhile attempt.

Churchill and Orwell never met, though they had acquaintances in common. (Given the chummy closeness of the British politico-literate classes, it would have been surprising if they didn't.) Ricks, therefore, tries to highlight two things: the ways in which their personal story arcs reflected each other, and the ways in which their thinking--specifically, both men's hatred of cant and unyielding defense of freedom--ran in parallel. When he sticks to this program, he's doing something really interesting. 

He just doesn't stick to it strenuously enough. Both threads of Churchill and Orwell spend a bit too much time in basic biographical detail, the kind you could get anywhere. It's all interesting, but it's not all deep. Ricks quite rightly magnifies the episodes that he considers most formative--particularly Orwell's experience in the Spanish Civil War and (inevitably) Churchill's triumphal return from political exile from the late 1930s to 1941. But he doesn't entirely solve the problem of making that stuff his exclusive, concentrated focus.

Still, I'd rather read an ambitious book that doesn't quite pull it off than an unambitious success. At its worst, Churchill and Orwell is entirely readable. At its best, it's thought-provoking. If you any interest in the 20th century's intellectual response to the problem of totalitarianism, this is a good book for you. Sadly, the matter is still relevant.

Book Review: Making It

[WARNING: long and slightly polemical.]

Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters
Louis Uchitelle
Politics, sociology

At the center of Making It there is an extremely acute observation: there is no such thing as laissez-faire manufacturing. There's always some kind of governmental support. This was true two centuries ago, when Samuel Slater avoided a British ban on exporting the designs of spinning machinery by memorizing how it worked. It was true in the 19th century, when tariffs protected U.S. industry and land grants supported the railroads. It's true now, when cities offer massive tax incentives to lure corporations.

To have no policy is itself a policy. That's what the federal government does now. As a result, the existing subsidy system is an incoherent mess of states and localities, all competing against one another. When companies build plants by looking for the biggest windfall, the result is not to create new jobs; it's just to move jobs from one place to another. This being the case, why not try to have a rational policy that promotes the common good?

Making It documents this observation with a wealth of statistics and facts. It documents, as well, the damage that the decline in manufacturing employment has wreaked. Unfortunately, it doesn't do nearly as good a job in analyzing what it's documented. The book's logic is a semi-random stew of non-sequiturs, circular arguments, and absurd prescriptions--and prescriptions is the word: Louis Uchitelle seems to be enamored of the top-down, there-oughta-be-a-law, Five Year Plan approach. He ought to be thinking in terms of incentives, not mandates. Mandates don't work. Incentives do. (Not, admittedly, always as designed.)

For instance, consider this excerpt (emphasis added):

. . . in accepting the move to ATS [an outsourcing company], the mechanics lowered the odds that the two hundred or so assembly line workers they had left behind would have the leverage to organize a union and then bargain for higher wages and job security. While still on staff, the mechanics were in a position to support the assembly line workers by striking if the latter did, or by not striking but engaging in a work slowdown--dragging out repairs--if the company brought in outsiders to replace the assembly line workers. Without willing mechanics, a machinery breakdown can halt an assembly line in any factory and even shut it down. The Oplers [the company owners] understood this. "In our negotiations with ATS we specified that having skilled mechanics on all shifts and at all times was the reason for going with that company . . . We found that we could hold ATS to a higher standard than we were able to attain on our own."

Do you see the trick here? The bolded sentences are being deployed to imply that the company moved its mechanics to ATS specifically in order to weaken employees' ability to strike. But the speaker doesn't say that. He just says that outsourcing gave them better availability. This is an artfully arranged synthesis, meant to support Making It's propaganda goals. It's not logic.

Here's another one:

Harley-Davidson . . . publicly declared in 201 that it would move some factory operations from Milwaukee, where it is headquartered, to a lower-wage city such as Stillwater, Oklahoma, or Kansas City, Missouri, if its hourly workers in Milwaukee failed to accept certain concessions . . . In the end, the regulars . . . gave in and ratified the contract, fearful they might lose their jobs altogether if Harley-Davidson carried out its threat to relocate. The city's taxpayers, however, were given no say in the matter--no opportunity to bat down Harley's threat--although their taxes helped to subsidize the company's operation in Milwaukee . . . [their] taxes should have given them a right to amend Harley's plan, and even to veto it by withholding subsidies from the company.

Seriously? What does Louis Uchitelle imagine that the taxpayers could do? Pass a city ordinance forbidding Harley-Davidson from moving any jobs? Threaten to soak them with extra taxes on their Milwaukee operations? (That would go well, I'm sure.) Confiscate their HQ?

Those flaws are specific. Others are endemic. Making It repeatedly faults manufacturers for moving out of central cities, for instance, but its only proposed cure is this: ". . . government money . . . could have been used to keep manufacturers and distributors rooted in the cities by helping them pay for their operations." Except that, just a few pages earlier, a factory owner says flatly that even with these subsidies, "No, I would not move back. The biggest cost is attracting and training a workforce, and then once I've got three hundred people in place in St. Louis, someone's going to say, 'Let's organize a union'." In other words, the book is promoting a plan that by its own testimony wouldn't work.

Let's face reality: we're in a competitive, profit-driven economy, with every company in the world in the same race. The companies that don't make money go under. If Apple can't make a profit manufacturing cell phones, Apple will stop manufacturing cell phones. If Apple starts charging an extra $50 per phone to support a stateside factory, it will lose market share to their competitors that don't. If we could somehow mandate that every cell phone sold in the U.S. be made entirely in the U.S., then the U.S. will end up with overpriced, crappy cell phones, because every company on the planet will have a positive incentive to not sell their wares here.

(Aside: Louis Uchitelle depends a lot on argument by anecdote. Well, here's a counter-anecdote for him. My very own wife is a mechanical engineer who works in a factory. Her group is currently competing with a state-supported company in Italy, one with very much the kinds of policy supports that Uchitelle seems to prefer. Her outfit can't compete on price, because of the subsidies. Nonetheless, they're winning business from those competitors, because those competitors make lousy products.)

If Louis Uchitelle had gotten a tough-minded and thoughtful critique of his manuscript, Making It could have been a book with a lot of impact. Instead, it's a book that will appeal entirely who readers who already agree with its conclusions. Uchitelle is a reporter, and the reportage is excellent. The thinking is not.

Thought Exercise: Red Bus, Blue Bus

Suppose you want to leave town. You're deciding whether to hop on the Blue Bus or the Red Bus.

You go to the driver of the Blue Bus and ask where it will take you. Says the driver: "Well, we'll pull out and head south on Chandler Road. That'll take us to U.S. 20 west, which should be OK at this time of day, but if the traffic's bad we can take a detour onto Simms Street. Five miles down we'll get onto the interstate, only we'll have to be careful to stay in the left lane, because there's a lot of construction going on down around Snowville.

"Now, one of our passengers would like to swing by Wal-Mart, so we'll get off for a while at exit 12. And there's a lady who really wants a Borscht Burger, so we'll make a ten-mile detour to the Burger Czar out by Hamptonfield. Then there's a rest stop after exit 21, where we can . . ."

So you go to the driver of the Red Bus and ask the same question. This driver says: "We're going to Vegas. Eighty miles per hour the whole way, no stops. It'll be great. Hop on."

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, the driver of the Blue Bus is still droning on about the New Jersey Turnpike.

Now, maybe Vegas isn't your top destination choice. You might be skeptical that you can do the whole trip at eighty with no stops. You might even think that the Red Bus driver is kind of full of it.

But here's the thing. When you came to the bus station, you needed to make a choice. You now know that the Red Bus driver has a destination in mind. He has expressed clearly where he is going and why he wants to go there. That's a positive reason to hop on the Red Bus. By contrast, the Blue Bus driver has not given you any reason to choose the Blue Bus--unless you happen to like Borscht Burgers.

The application to recent politics is left as an exercise for the reader.

Uncharted Waters

WARNING: politics ahoy.

I am not a historian, but I do read a good many history books. What follows is my best attempt at analyzing what's going on in the wake of Donald Trump's election. I'm specifically trying to be factual rather than polemical, but obviously my prejudices will color my conclusions.

So now what? Well, whatever else it may be, Trumpism is manifestly:

• Nationalist, in that it embraces an "America First" ideology;
• Populist, in that it stokes up and harnesses anger directed at elites; and
• Authoritarian, in that an admiration for "strength" seems to be a core belief both for Trump and for his followers.

Regardless of whether you believe these things are good or bad, that's an empirical capsule description of Trumpism.

The United States has never before had a mass nationalist-populist-authoritarian political movement--at least, not one with this kind of power. Andrew Jackson came close, but Jackson in the 1820s was at least in harmony with his own political party. Huey Long took some steps in that direction before he was assassinated. The 19th-century "Know-Nothings" were profoundly nativist, and (briefly) had significant political power, but they didn't have the other characteristics.

So, as the title says: we're in uncharted waters.

However: other nations have had, and continue to have, nationalist-populist-authoritarian political parties. Historical comparisons are unavoidably fraught with emotion, but there are plenty of current examples. Consider Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and (no avoiding this one) Vladimir Putin in Russia. To find out what's in store for the U.S., we can look at these. I draw these conclusions:

• These regimes tend to become repressive over time. The weaker the nation's civil and political institutions, the faster the repressiveness comes. If anyone has an example of a nationalist-populist-authoritarian regime which has not tended toward repression, please leave me a comment.
• A core constituency develops whose members will never under any circumstances turn on the leader. It doesn't matter how far the leader goes or in what direction. As long as they feel that the Strong Man stays strong, his adherents will follow him.
• When I say "the leader," I mean "the leader." It's not a group or an explicit ideology that animates the movement. It's hero-worship of a particular man. (I can't come up with a single female example off the top of my head.)
• The leader usually surrounds himself with loyalists. They may be competent or incompetent; that's neither here nor there to the boss. They are never strong enough to stand up to the autocrat in their own right, but they often use their position to build up their own power bases.
• Once in power, the regime takes steps to remain in power. Opposition politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and so forth are removed or neutralized. Non-core or borderline supporters are forced to choose: join the movement, or be purged. The vast majority of them join.

In our case, I expect that the last bullet point will occur first. Trumpism is the new normal in the Republican Party. This would (in my opinion) surely have occurred if Trump had lost, but now it will happen faster and more thoroughly. A few formerly-mainstream Republicans will make ineffectual gestures towards resistance, but the rank and file will go along.

The third bullet is another interesting point. Trump is seventy years old. Strong-man leaders don't have a great record of transferring their authority to anyone else (Nicolas Maduro and Dmitriy Medvedev are cases in point). We're probably still too early in the process for him to pull off a family dynasty a la North Korea or Syria. Prognosis: unknown.

Finally, the U.S. has generally had strong civil institutions. It may be that they will check the repressive tendencies of the neo-Republican/Trumpist movement, or at least slow it down--through sheer inertia, if nothing else. Barring a major policy blunder, however, I think we are likely to see our politics dominated by mobs of insecure and angry white people for some time to come.

Book Review: Rightful Heritage

Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America
Douglas Brinkley
History, biography

The Roosevelt who usually gets all the good conservation press--not without merit--is FDR's fifth cousin Theodore. If Franklin gets any credit, it's usually for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Rightful Heritage is Douglas Brinkley's exhaustive attempt to rebalance the historical scales.

It works very well, at the level of partisan investigative journalism. That is, Rightful Heritage is a long catalogue of who, what, where, when, why. The who is usually FDR, and the what is usually working the politics of conservation. You can open the book to pretty much any page and find out that on [date], FDR was working towards establishing the [Soandso National Wildlife Refuge/Park/Forest]. The focus is on his first two presidential terms, but--as Brinkley makes clear--this was a lifelong passion, curtailed but not stopped even by the Second World War.

That, by the way, is one of Rightful Heritage's better accomplishments: it gives Roosevelt some credit for both personal consistency and intellectual heft. FDR was a notoriously protean man, and various observers have derided him for it. He was "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament" (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.). Or he was "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president" (Walter Lippman). Theodore Roosevelt's acid-tongued daughter Alice called him "Miss Nancy". However, Brinkley's research makes an overwhelming case that conservation was for FDR a lifelong, serious, and consistent passion, one to which he gave his full attention and of which he had an excellent intellectual and policy grasp.

The overwhelmingness of the case gets to be too much sometimes. That's the limitation of investigative-journalistic writing. Many of the pre-presidential chapters read like diary entries: each paragraph is complete of itself, but completely lacking in connective tissue to what's around it. (I believe I once counted seven consecutive paragraphs with totally unconnected topic sentences.) There isn't much analysis or depth in Rightful Heritage (the ever-present tension between "wise use" conservation and "forever wild" conservation is described, but never really explored), and Brinkley makes his partisanship pretty glaring. And let's face it: six hundred pages of who, what, etc. can't help but be repetitive.

So Rightful Heritage is not entirely for the faint of heart. If your interest in FDR or conservation would be met by a Wikipedia article, best go there. If you're opposed to conservation or to Roosevelt himself or to Rooseveltian political ideas, this book will just make you angry. On the other hand, it doesn't require any special background knowledge, it's nicely readable prose, and it does exactly what it sets out to do: give Franklin Roosevelt the respect he should have as an effective conservationist activist politician.

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This book crosses not one but two Ken Burns documentaries: The National Parks: America's Best Idea and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. I recommend both of them highly, particularly the latter. (Seriously, if you're the kind of person who likes this blog, you need to watch Ken Burns documentaries.) 

On the written side, The Man He Became by James Tobin is a very fine and focused chronicle of Roosevelt's polio, his paralysis, and how his response to it changed him. There's a respectable argument that Roosevelt was something of a lightweight--specifically, that he was something of a Cousin Teddy Roosevelt wannabe--and that his response to his illness was one of the things that forced him to become his own man.

The Spirit of '16

[WARNING: politics (Irish, though)]

2016 is the 100-year anniversary of the Easter Rising. If that doesn't ring many bells with you, the short version is that it's roughly the Irish equivalent of Lexington and Concord plus July 4, 1776. Not surprisingly, Ireland is in all-out commemorative mode.

I've just come back from there. I didn't discuss Irish politics, much less sing Irish political songs. It's not my business to visit another country and tell them how to run it, or how to understand its past. Now that I'm back, though, I have some thoughts.

There's a standard narrative of the 1916 Rising. The rebels are heroic visionaries, and their actions--however destructive in the short term--are ultimately justified by History. The corollary is that there was no better way to achieve this righteous outcome.

It's always comforting to believe this sort of thing. We Americans have a similar standard narrative. Here's one difference, though: the American Revolution was a revolution of ideas*. We didn't invoke a mystical moral right of nationhood based on territory or ethnicity or identity. We invoked, rather, an idea--the idea that monarchy is wrong in principle. We didn't just reject what Britain was doing; we rejected the philosophical basis for doing it.

Reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, I see an assertion of an ethnic identity. I see a rejection of all things English/British. I see a lot of (justified) anger at centuries of British misrule and colonialism and exploitation**.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. 

What I don't see is any assertion of principle. And that bothers me. In the century since 1916, we have seen too much cruelty based on metaphysical ethnic nationalism. Isn't this at least veering towards the principle of Volksgeminschaft? Irish = Not-British = Good, which in turn means that British = Evil, which in turn justifies anything.

That wasn't the majority position at the time, either. From what I've read, the most popular Irish political parties in 1916 weren't separatists at all; they were advocates for Home Rule (now known as devolution). In other words, there plenty of people were willing to believe that they could be both British and Irish.

They may have been wrong. The government response to the Easter Rising convinced many of them that they were. 

Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

Still, as an American, I'm comfortable with the notion of a hyphenated identity. And as a reader of history, I don't buy the dictum that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." Political violence is failure. That's true in 1776, 1916, 1861, 1914, 1939 ... Sometimes, perhaps, the failure is inevitable; but inevitable failure is failure nonetheless.

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*Yes, I am vastly oversimplifying here. I don't mean to imply that every Minuteman was a political philosopher, or that the public at large was motivated entirely by an abstract desire for a more just society. In every war, individuals fight for a wide variety of reasons. There is also a collective purpose at work, though, and it makes a difference.
**British practice and policy in Ireland were infinitely more destructive than anything that happened in the American colonies. Religious persecution, prejudice, social stratification, administrative incompetence, broken treaties ... you could cogently argue that Britain had already forfeited any moral right to exercise authority over Ireland. By contrast, Americans in 1775 were already the free-est, least-taxed people on earth.

Book Review: Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow
Biography

Alexander Hamilton is on the U.S. $10 bill. I'd be willing to wager a good many of those bills that most Americans have no idea why. He wasn't president. He wasn't Benjamin Franklin. He doesn't even have a big old memorial. What makes this guy important?

Ron Chernow's book will tell you that, for starters, if he hadn't done a brilliant job as the nation's first Treasury secretary, there wouldn't be a U.S. $10 bill. There might not be a United States. Alexander Hamilton is big, it's exhaustive, it's very well-written, it's often insightful--and it makes an well-argued case for Hamilton's genius and his contributions.

If the book has a weakness, it's that--like many other books of its stripe--it gets a little too sympathetic towards its subject. Chernow is not out to do a whitewash job; we get a full view of Hamilton's personal failings and his political missteps; but Chernow invites us to infer that Alexander Hamilton was never wrong on matters of policy.

Perhaps that's inevitable. We do, as has often been pointed out, live in Alexander Hamilton's American rather than Thomas Jefferson's. We're not a loose agglomeration of sturdy, independent yeomen; we're an industrial, mercantile society with a strong central government. Yet I don't think it's wrong to say that we're living with the defects, as well as the virtues, of the Hamiltonian vision. I suspect, for instance, that Jefferson would regard Donald Trump as a perfect exemplar of Homo hamiltonensis: a speculator, a crony capitalist, a would-be autarch, a demagogue, and a moneyed corruptor of public virtue.

That's not a concession that Ron Chernow makes. Jefferson, like the other actors in this book, appears only in so far as he impacted Hamilton; his own views are not brought forward, and reading this book will not give you a sense of their merits (whatever they might be).

Similarly, Hamilton's own views are presented through a slightly rosy lens. His enemies often accused him of being an aristocrat and of favoring a monarchy. Chernow goes to great lengths to counter these charges. And yet ... Hamilton's friend Gouverneur Morris wrote, in his own private diary and in preparation for delivering Hamilton's formal eulogy: "He was on principal opposed to republican and attached to monarchical government." I'm not so sure that we can dismiss this evidence, as Chernow does, by saying that "Morris distorted and exaggerated Hamilton's views no less than his Republican enemies".

On the other hand, Chernow does show just how deep those distortions were, and how baseless. Perhaps his most telling point is that Hamilton's most vicious opponents, the ones who accused him of wanting to establish an American aristocracy, were southern slave-holding landed gentry. How much more aristocratic can you get? It's hard not to agree with Chernow's point that their real objection was that a Hamiltonian aristocracy would be one of earned merit, rather than birth.

I can't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone who isn't at least a bit familiar with revolutionary-era history. It's 722 pages long; it's not suitable as an introduction! However, if you are interested in the subject, Alexander Hamilton is not only a good book, but an important one. Hamilton was as crucial a figure as Washington or Franklin or Jefferson. It's certainly time he got his recognition.

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There are so many good histories and biographies of the Founding Fathers that I couldn't possibly list them all. Specifically, however, Chernow's own Washington: A Life, David McCullough's John Adams, and Joseph Ellis's Passionate Sage and American Sphinx shed more light on some of the other dramatis personae.

Book Review: Information Doesn't Want to Be Free

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
Cory Doctorow
Intellectual property

This is an if-you're-not-outraged-you're-not-paying-attention manifesto. Doctorow's thesis is that current copyright law is (a) ill-suited to digital content, (b) designed to protect middlemen, rather than creators, and (c) EVIL EVIL EVIL.

It's a good read--full of blood-pressure-raising anecdotes, forceful analogies, sharply-argued case studies, and general get-off-my-lawn crankiness. A representative and very apposite quote: "Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy". As the proprietor of this here extremely-obscure blog (see description above), I entirely agree. Content consumers--so Doctorow proposes--are happy to pay content creators directly, given the opportunity, which is why distributors and merchandisers are furiously running around passing ever-more-intrusive, ever-less-enforceable laws to restrict the possibility. Those of us who labor in wholly-unmerited anonymity have more to gain than to lose.

Well, maybe so. I'm no fan of the heavy-handed way that major corporations have gutted, subverted, and generally bought out what was originally a fairly equitable U.S. copyright system. I'm nonetheless skeptical that Doctorow's prospective infotopia will necessarily usher in a magical golden age of sparkly happy unicorns and file sharing. What does seem evident is that things will change ... and people--creators, investors, distributors, and consumers--will adapt.

Also, if anyone out there is itching to rescue me from obscurity in exchange for large sums of money, I'm ready to talk.

Book Review: Space Chronicles

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Space travel, science

If you've watched the recent re-launch of the TV series Cosmos, you know who Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If you haven't, you ought to.

Space Chronicles presents Tyson in very much the same role, and with the same voice, that he uses on the series. Namely: an articulate, genial, folksy, non-mathematical enthusiast for all scientific things great and small. Here, he's specifically talking about the rationale for exploring space. It's a pretty good book, particularly for someone with some interest but not much background knowledge.

There are some caveats. The essays were originally assembled from a disparate collection of articles, op-ed pieces, interviews, and speeches, so they're a little jumbled in their overall effect. Tyson is also a better speaker than an essayist; these pieces tend to jump around a little. rather than latching onto a central thread and pulling on it.

Some overarching themes do emerge, and the collection is the stronger for it. For instance, Tyson repeatedly hammers home the relative smallness of NASA's budget (roughly 0.5 cents of every federal dollar). He's at his most passionate and engaging when he talks about the importance of sheer, unadulterated wonder--the wonder that inspires young people to be curious, to ask unanswerable questions, to find a feverish ambition to know more. (I speak from experience.) This is his answer to the perennial "why-spend-money-in-space-when-we-could-spend-it-here" shibboleth. Spending money on Earth may fill bellies; spending money on wonder opens minds.

Space Chronicles is less technical than Isaac Asimov's many popular-science essays, and less consciously literary than Stephen Jay Gould, but it's likely to appeal to fans of those authors (and vice-versa).

Book Review: The Sleepwalkers

Warning: long post ahead.

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Christopher Clark
History

Christopher Clark starts out by announcing that he's going to disregard why World War I started in favor of asking how. It's an admirable ambition: the latter question is a good deal more concrete, and also steers away from the seduction of single-causation fallacies.

He doesn't really do it, though. This is a history with a purpose. Clark is arguing for replacing one origin story with another. The customary narrative tends to cast Germany and Austria-Hungary as the bad actors, with France and Russia as more-or-less innocent  victims. Clark, by contrast, blames hyper-nationalist Serbs and their pet bomb-throwing terrorists.

It's easy to see why the former narrative caught on in the mid-20th century. It's equally easy to see why the latter is appealing in a post-9/11, post-Yugoslavia world. He's particularly emphatic about the Austrians' reaction. They, after all, were the victims of a terror attack. Did they, Clark asks pointedly, have no right to respond?

To appropriate a formulation that Clark uses in another context, "This view is not wrong".

On the other hand--and, with a statement like that, there's bound to be a qualifier--I can think of a more recent case where a powerful nation, in the wake of a terrorist attack, invaded a perennially-hostile, ethnically-divided foreign country, believing that said foreign country was implicated in said terrorism, and determined that its intransigent, bellicose, semi-criminal regime be brought to heel. That one didn't turn out so well, either. Clark, consciously or otherwise, avoids framing events in this light. His defense of Austria-Hungary is spirited and well-reasoned, but he's a little too forgiving. A nation may have a moral/legal right to defend itself, yet take specific actions that are not moral, nor legal, nor wise.

In his zeal to re-surface the Balkans as the cynosure of events, Clark is dismissive of some of the traditional interpretations. A couple of examples that I happen to know a bit about:

• He argues that the British/German naval arms race was not a major factor, because the British always had more battleships. That's misleading. The Royal Navy believed that it had to be larger than the next two largest fleets combined. Britain was a naval power, hugely dependent on maritime trade; it kept, and might require, warships everywhere on the globe. Germany was a land power with virtually no need of its few overseas territories. The Royal Navy had to be ready to fight any enemy, anywhere. The Imperial German Navy had exactly one major target, lying right on its front doorstep--a fact which not only multiplied their effective forces, but enabled them to design ships with less range and more armor.
• He correctly observes that the "odd couple" alliance of France and Russia was fueled by French fixation on Germany as "the primary enemy", but he more or less glosses over the reasons why the French might feel that way. Alsace-Lorraine gets seven scattered pages in the index. That's a little more than Spain, but a little less than Egypt.

Also, although The Sleepwalkers isn't aimed strictly at an academic audience, Clark writes like an academic. I don't mean he's unreadable--his prose is lucid, though a tad colorless--but he does have certain ingrained instincts, which don't always jibe with writing for a general audience:

• There are some terms and phrases that Clark loves a little too much: "world-historical", "irredentism", and so on. I suppose that these are terms of art in his field, with specific meanings that are important to his thesis. For a general reader, however, a little thumbing through the thesaurus wouldn't have hurt, even at the cost of lost precision for the specialists.
• More seriously, Clark assumes all of his readers are familiar with all of his events. His structure is not strictly chronological, nor geographic--I'd call it a thematic organization--with the result that he jumps around a lot in time and space. That's not by itself a bad thing. It's a possible problem, though, when he references different aspects of the same event in half-a-dozen widely-spacd passages. Similarly, throwing in early and unexplained references to "the Agadir crisis" or "the Anglo-French thaw of 1903" is only appropriate for readers who are already familiar with the basic facts of the period. (For the record: yes, I'm one of them, but I'm a geek.)
• Completist tendencies. This shows itself most damagingly in the sections on Serbia, where Clark seems determined to drag in every minor fact and tangentially-important person he's ever heard of. There are too many people with too little relevance--scan through the index for names with just one or two page references and you'll see what I mean. For an academic book, intended for use and reference by scholars, that's perhaps appropriate. A better design for a popular book would be to eliminate the minor players, and add a Dramatis Personae section in the front matter for the major ones.
• And, perhaps inevitably for an explicitly 21st-century interpretation, Clark occasionally succumbs to presentism. The most glaring example is the comparison of Austria-Hungary's 1914 ultimatum to Serbia with NATO's 1999 ultimatum to the same state. Yes, the latter is vastly more muscular. So what? By 1914 standards, the Austrian demand was genuine fire-breathing intimidation, and neither her allies nor her foes pretended otherwise.

None of this is to say that The Sleepwalkers is a bad book. On the contrary, it's a very valuable book. It's fantastically well researched (there are over 1500 citations, or an average of about three per page) and minutely observed. It provides an incisive critique of conventional thinking. I especially applaud his perceptive character portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his examination of where decision-making power was actually located.

All the same, to my mind the most compelling message in The Sleepwalkers is one that Clark never explicitly mentions. In the year 2015, we think of military alliances and wars as confrontations between incompatible value systems. To us, for instance, it seems obvious to parse the Cold War as a face-off between liberal capitalist democracy and communist dictatorship.

No political leaders in 1914 seem to have thought that way. To them, military alliances and wars were tools for promoting their individual nations' self-interest. War might be ugly, but it wasn't illegitimate. Military blackmail, extortion, and out-and-out armed robbery were, to these men, part of the cost of doing business.

The national self-interest they were serving--for which they were willing to throw away young men's lives--wasn't even what we'd call a "vital interest", with the arguable and partial exception of Russia. Here's illuminating instance:

France might consider allowing Austria to take a part of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a mere "pile of rocks" ... [but] France "would be obliged also to demand advantages, an island in the Aegean Sea, for example ..."

France had no more genuine need of a random Aegean flyspeck than Austria required that particular "pile of rocks". But need wasn't the point; this was a statement about prestige, about one-upmanship, about who could beat up whom. 

These men (and they were all men) weren't standing on principle. 

They were playing for points. 

For comparison, it's worth reading Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August and perhaps The Proud Tower--lesser in exhaustive scholarship, but superior as literature. Robert Massie's excellent Dreadnought is specifically focused on the naval arms race; it shows masterful craftsmanship in managing and making sense of a large cast of characters.

States' Wrongs

When I lived in Texas, I occasionally had to listen to people espousing one of the Big Lies of U.S. History. Namely, “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about States’ Rights!” The South, says the narrative, was defending its rights against the oppression of Washington. (Stop me if this sounds familiar.)

It’s certainly true that, during the 1850s, several states witnessed an unprecedented level of federal interference in their internal affairs—thitherto considered sacrosanct. There were mass protests and even riots against government law enforcement. In at least one case, the U.S. army marched in and enforced, at gunpoint, a flagrant violation of state law in favor of federal power (at the then-enormous cost of $40,000). In another case, a woman killed her own daughter rather than submit to the armed U.S. Marshals who stormed her house amidst gunfire. In yet other cases, the locals broke into courtrooms or forcibly liberated prisoners rather than see their laws violated.

The states whose right were thus trampled on were, of course, all in the North

The laws in question were “personal liberty” laws, meant to exclude slavery. The expansion of Federal muscle was in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.

Southerners, far from being oppressed by the jackbooted thugs of Washington, cheered them on. Similarly, while Southern states frequently invoked their right to “nullify” federal laws that weren’t to their taste, they were outraged when Northern states tried to do the same thing.

And when war did break out--when seven southern states seceded rather than obey the results of a perfectly legal election, before Lincoln even took office--what was the intolerable, radical straw that broke the camel's back? What tyrannical principle was it that was so deeply embedded in the Republican platform that preemptive secession was the only way to defend Southern liberty?

It was this: that slavery should be left alone, but prevented from expanding.

Funny kid of oppression, that.