Three more Americans died this week because of Trump's utterly needless and unjustifiable war of aggression in Iran.
As Thomas Hardy wrote of another pointless colonial war—this one at the turn of the century:
South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman [...]
I finally finished Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs) this week. The book has sat on my shelf unread and followed me through various moves for at least a decade—perhaps almost two—so I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in getting around to it at long last—even if the book is not that long and can be read in a day or two.
My copy dates from a 2007 print run, and comes complete with an introduction by Roger Kimball, of The New Criterion and National Review fame—which feels very of its moment. These were the grand old days of bow-tie-wearing right-wing "intellectuals"—and there was something of a vogue among neoconservatives for Benda specifically.
Norman Mailer writes at one point in The Armies of the Night that, whatever else the Vietnam War did, it brought the American Left back together again.
For the decades before the war, after all, the Left had fractured down the middle over the issue of communism and the Soviet Union. "Consider a countdown of the punches," Mailer writes; "famine in the Ukraine; Moscow trials; Hitler-Stalin pact; slave-labor camps; Cold War"—and on.
For my sins, I still occasionally check in on that podcast I was ranting about a few weeks ago—the one that features a couple of leftist bros I used to admire from the good old days of the fight against the neocons.
This time, they were out with a new episode reporting on a bunch of corruption scandals and mob hits in Ukraine (some with shadowy alleged ties to state security forces), which they claim are being under-reported in the Western press.
Back in the late'40s, when he was slowly divesting himself of his earlier pacifism and becoming a reluctant Cold Warrior, Dwight Macdonald felt called upon to explain in print whether there was any daylight now between his position and that of President Truman.
Macdonald explained that there still was; and it consisted chiefly in the fact that the means by which the U.S. government proposed to prosecute the Cold War were wrong, in his view—because they would make enemies of those he called "the chief victims of Stalin's system"—"namely the people of Russia."
The recent death of Lindsey Graham prompted me to recall that ugly episode from the early weeks after the October 7 massacre, when he appeared to justify the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in retaliation.
In one interview, Graham was asked: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government in which the U.S. would say let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?"
The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know.
Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form.
Earlier this week, a group of nearly 200 economists and businesspeople signed an open letter on the future of AI, entitled "We Must Act Now."
The statement is a model of strategic ambiguity—that sort of deliberate fuzziness as to key details that is often required to reach a consensus viewpoint that a large committee of people might be willing to get behind.
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions.
To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them.
In yesterday's post, after devoting about 75% of the piece to expounding all the good reasons to despise Lindsey Graham—I ended by admitted that, in spite of everything, I always sort of liked him.
It was seemingly hard not to. Even during Biden's last State of the Union speech in 2024, he at one point made some inside joke and pointed at Graham. "Lindsey knows what I'm talking about," he said. Cut to a shot of Graham giggling in the audience.
By any reasonable standards, Lindsey Graham—the Republican Senator from South Carolina who died over the weekend—was a pretty terrible person.
He knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. In his own short-lived bid for the White House in 2016, Graham correctly diagnosed Trump as a "xenophobe" and a "bigot." Graham's own policy views obviously inclined him to the paradoxical mix of warmongering neocon hawkism and genuine patriotic idealism that motivated a figure like John McCain—in other words, the polar opposite of a corrupt transactionalist like Trump.
My post the other day about Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests ended with something of a cliffhanger, so I wanted to swing back around to revisit it now.
As Hirschman documents extensively in that book, early modern political thinkers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to curb more effectively the human propensity to violence and despotism—given that mere "moralistic exhortation" had at best proved ineffective (and at worst had itself inflamed the tendency to persecution and war).
Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump in the midst of the ongoing war in the Middle East.
What?! Assassinate our head of state in the midst of ongoing negotiations?
Oh, you mean—exactly what we just did to them about four months ago?
I was listening to the latest episode of the Rational Security podcast yesterday, and they devoted a segment to reporting that Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney and fixer turned critic, has now apparently changed his mind for a second time and become a Trump loyalist again.
For those who missed the intervening change of heart, Cohen at one point renounced his friendship with Trump and said in effect that he regretted ever knowing him. Indeed, Cohen notably testified against Trump at his New York trial.
The New York Times ran a story yesterday whose headline says it all: "Trump, Ending Decades of Protection, Opens Wild Habitats to Drilling and Mining."
Even without reading the article I could have guessed what, specifically, he had done. Back in law school, I recall reading the 1995 Supreme Court case that dealt with the definition of the term "harm" in the Endangered Species Act.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The other day on his Substack, Matt Yglesias was writing about how all the DSA progressives who have recently been winning primary elections are 99% indistinguishable from their "establishment" rivals, except that they use the word "oligarchy" and are even more mad at Israel.
Ha! I thought; Zing! Pow! Good one!
Both sides of the Democratic civil war in the blue state primaries, he argues, are "well to the left of the median voter" already. Neither of them—establishment nor DSA "populist"—is actually making the pivot to the center that will be needed to win elections.
The Supreme Court's decision in the trans student athletes case got kind of buried in the headlines earlier this week, since it was released the same morning as the surprisingly reassuring birthright citizenship decision.
I went back to look up the opinion last night, though, and it really is a nasty little piece of work that probably would have received more attention, had the Court not released such a blockbuster positive ruling on the same day.
So, by the latest news accounts, Trump's meme coin turned out to be exactly the pyramid scheme it looked like. According to the New York Times yesterday, Trump's crypto business followed the classic life cycle of most such financial scams.
The token first skyrocketed in value—leading on many innocent people to risk their savings on an investment in the coin. By now, however, it has apparently lost between 80 to 97% of its peak value.
So I guess now the Trump administration is blatantly blocking the Venezuelan opposition leader's efforts to return to her own country in order to help with earthquake relief—presumably because we find it more convenient to have the country's current authoritarian leader govern without elections indefinitely, so long as she remains in effect a U.S. puppet.
In case anyone was still wondering whether that commando raid on Maduro was really about "supporting Venezuelan democracy"—here's your answer. The same government that kidnapped Maduro is now so wedded to his successor regime that we won't even help the country's democratic opposition set foot in her homeland in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake.
