The Passions and the Interests

 As I've argued before on this blog, the core challenge for every modern society—regardless of its political structure—is how to get large numbers of genetically-unrelated strangers to cooperate with one another in complex enterprises for long periods of time. In order to achieve this seemingly miraculous feat, as I've pointed out, states tend to rely on some mix of three basic motivators: coercion (Max Weber's "organized violence"), economic self-interest, and voluntary altruism (a.k.a. morality). 

A key objection to capitalism and market society from their inception has been that they rely too heavily on the second of these three motives, at the expense of the third. As Marx and Engels put it, capitalism had reduced human relations to nothing but "callous 'cash payment.'" Thomas Carlyle famously made the same critique, warning against the "cash nexus" becoming the sole basis of human society.  

Paragraph Nineteen

 A truly jaw-dropping report from the Associated Press yesterday describes a lawsuit now pending, which alleges Trump administration officials actively colluded with the Iranian government to repatriate Iranian asylum-seekers who feared torture, death, and persecution at the hands of that same government.  

These are people who, for one reason or another, refused to accept the rule of the Islamic Republic. They had the courage to come to the United States to try to escape the repression and authoritarianism of their home government (a government that, let us recall, still routinely does things like hang dissidents or sentence women to be beaten for appearing in public with bare shoulders). 

Left YIMBYs and Left NIMBYs

 This time last year, the must-read book of the summer was Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance. A manifesto for a certain type of West Coast liberal, the book staked out a clear and well-articulated position within one of the emerging quadrants of our current four-way political divide over local zoning and development policy. 

Suppose we imagine a grid. On one axis, we have the YIMBYs vs. the NIMBYs. But within each of these groups, there is a left/right divide. And so, we need another axis: left vs. right. And so, there are right YIMBYs and left YIMBYs, right NIMBYs and left NIMBYS. 

Establishment and Progressive

 In the midst of the ongoing fallout from the Graham Platner controversy, I received a mass email from a progressive group aligned with Bernie Sanders. They formally withdrew their endorsement of Platner—but then fiercely underlined that this must not be read as an "opening for the Establishment," and that they would continue to fight for a "progressive" candidate for Maine. 

As so often in these debates, the militant fury of this message seemed so disproportionate to the inciting cause. I have never been able to discover what actual policy difference—if any—separates the "progressives" from the "moderates" in Maine Democratic politics. 

Davy Crockett Was a Whig Op!

Our standard mental image of Davy Crockett is as the ultimate backwoodsman—a coonskin cap–wearing populist who embodied all the visual tropes of the age of Jacksonian Democracy. 

There's just one odd thing: the historical Davy Crockett wasn't a Jacksonian Democrat. He was a Whig. 

Right-Wing Fellow Travelers

 I was fleetingly curious yesterday to see what Trump had found to talk about in his 250th anniversary speech—given that all the traditional themes of our American civic religion are off-limits to him. He can't talk about how we're a nation of immigrants—since we are apparently no longer proud of this, and Trump is trying to undo the fact. He can't talk about how our history represents a gradual unfolding of greater rights and justice, since here too: Trump is trying to reverse this trajectory. 

So when it comes time for Trump to celebrate two and a half centuries of American history, I wondered, what would he find to say? 

A Crawling Prosperity

 We all recall that disgraceful ruere in servitium—dubbed at the time the "Great Accommodation" — that followed Trump's second election and the start of his second term—when formerly Trump-critical billionaires stepped forward one by one to "bend the knee," as people called it at the time. 

Mark Zuckerberg went—seemingly overnight—from a liberal donor who backed immigration causes to a chain-wearing Trumpophile who described the president as "badass"; the head of Palantir went from endorsing Kamala Harris to being a right-wing zealot who makes excuses for Trump's extrajudicial killings in even less time.