Farm Populism

 Reading V.L. Parrington's epic three-volume study of the Main Currents in American Thought, it is clear that a persistent theme in the work—indeed, a characteristic obsession of Parrington's—is that American farmers and agrarian interests have long been the source of every progressive, popular, democratic, pacifist, humane, and reformist impulse in American life. 

John Dos Passos's USA trilogy often reflects the same assumption. When Wilson's war in Europe looms, the characters in Dos Passos's epic often talk as if it were a given that the small farmers of the great Midwestern Plains would be one of the surest political obstacles (alongside industrial workers) to this push for war and profiteering. 

Penguin Logic

 The bill for Congress's attack on the welfare state is slowly coming due. Millions of people have already lost food assistance over the last year due to new SNAP "work requirements" enacted under Trump's reconciliation bill. Next week, on October 1, the federal government will cut its contribution to the administrative costs of the program, shifting more of the responsibility to states—changes that many observers fear could force still more people off the benefit rolls. 

At the start of next year, new "work requirements" also go into effect for Medicaid. Congress already allowed expanded ACA subsidies to lapse. J.D. Vance—a man who embodies the Straussian dictum that a lie repeated often enough will be perceived as true—brags that he just eliminated 750,000 cases from the ACA rolls for reasons of "fraud" (read the room, bro—do you think taking more people off health benefits is anyone's idea of a top priority right now?)

Snubbing Africa

 A couple days ago, the UN General Assembly voted to replace the Mercator projection on global maps with a new visualization of the world that depicts the relative sizes of the various continents more accurately. 

The United States was the only government on earth to vote against the new map. 

Why? Because Trump is wedded to the delusion that Greenland is bigger than it is, because of his colonial designs on the Danish territory? 

Debt Crisis

 The New York Times ran an opinion piece today hinting at an outside-the-box solution to the problem of our swelling national debt (which notoriously passed the $40 trillion mark this past week): namely, simply cancel it. Refuse to pay. 

The piece points out that ancient civilizations did this all the time. In fact, many of them built some sort of periodic debt jubilee into their calendars. 

The Day of Reckoning

 The Bezos-ified Washington Post ran a big scary editorial the other day warning about looming fiscal catastrophe, due to the inexorable rise of government spending and public debt. 

On the one hand, I'm tempted to dismiss this as ideologically-motivated alarmism. (One notices the essay points the finger at entitlement spending but does not mention Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, e.g.) Besides, people have been saying for years that we are headed for a debt crisis, yet it never actually seems to arrive. 

The Gladiators

 Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators is ostensibly a novel about the first century B.C.—Koestler's only "historical" novel, to my knowledge. But it is quite obviously also a novel about the twentieth century. 

Knowing what we do about Koestler's life circumstances and the state of Europe in 1939—when the book was published—this should perhaps not surprise us. 

Burrito-Logic

 Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction. 

To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals. 

Ceuta

 The arrival earlier this week of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta (a Spanish territory in North Africa) obviously gave the global far-right an issue they could demagogue for days. Extreme rightists on both sides of the Atlantic (including, of course, people in and close to our own U.S. government), who have been framing nonwhite immigration as an "invasion" all along, could flaunt viral images of the desperate sea of humanity and say: "see!? this is what happens as soon as you elect a leftist government! They open the borders!"

That much—alas—is expected at this point. 

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

 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. 

The Divine Pig

 Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty. 

This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act." 

Millions

 Trump's sweeping termination of U.S. foreign aid programs last year has largely fallen off of most of our news feeds—leaving a lot of conservative influencers to declare that it was all no big deal; a nothingburger. 

But Nick Kristof today in the New York Times does the math and brings the receipts. He marshals convincing evidence that the number of people—mostly children under five—who have died so far as a result of Trump's aid withdrawals is at least in the hundreds of thousands. 

Ban Foie Gras

 The Boston Globe had an article out yesterday about the growing nationwide movement to ban foie gras. 

Like a lot of people, I at first assumed this movement was just a bunch of annoying self-righteous busybodies looking for any available moral crusade. 

This attitude on my part lasted precisely as long as it took someone to describe to me for the first time what is actually involved in making foie gras.

Soaking the Poor

 Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America. 

And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course. 

Peak AI Panic is Back

 I was saying just the other day on this blog that there was a weird and growing disconnect between the panic consuming the world of Bay Area AI developers, and the generally blasé attitude toward AI on the part of the rest of us "normies." 

This was definitely a week, though, in which the gap suddenly shrunk. The panic caught up with the rest of us—helped in large part by a single, well-written and algorithmically-optimized X post called "Something Big is Happening." 

Permabear

 I was reading in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the career of the value investor Jeremy Grantham, sometimes known as the "Permabear." He has been saying for years—if not decades, at this point—that the entire equity market is in a bubble. We're talking more than just an "AI bubble" here. Plenty of people think those stocks are criminally overvalued right now. Grantham does them all one better—he thinks that the pricing of the entire stock market has gotten unmoored from any rational relationship to underlying earnings and other measures of intrinsic value. 

He's probably right; and this week is offering him a measure of vindication. Panic about new AI tools—and how quickly they can be used to build software performing a wide variety of specialized functions, with minimal if any knowledge of coding required—has sent software stocks into a tailspin. This "Anthropic" effect has been enough to pull down the larger tech sector for a few days, plus the larger stock indices—the Nasdaq and S&P 500—that are most reliant on it. Meanwhile, investors are "rotating out" into previously less favored parts of the market: mid-caps, foreign stocks, "defensive" sectors, etc. 

Not Good at Eating

 After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it. 

One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap. 

Weakness and Struggles

 The massive protests taking place in Iran right now—which the ruling regime has characteristically met with death and repression—are generally understood to have been sparked most immediately by rampant inflation. The Iranian rial has reportedly lost more than half its value in the last six months, and food prices in the country have spiked by more than 60%. 

One can attribute this economic collapse—with some justice—to the economic mismanagement of the regime. And indeed, the Iranian president didn't do himself any favors when he effectively threw up his hands the other week and announced that he was basically out of ideas for how to address the country's many economic problems. 

Sanctions and Blockades

 In the emerging literature of apologetics trying to preemptively justify Trump's apparent regime-change operation in Venezuela, it has become standard to speak of the South American country as a "failed state." Which it is, in many respects. But the question is: who made it that way? 

We could speak, as so many pundits do, in vague terms about "economic mismanagement." As further clarified in the news articles, this phrase usually translates to something like: "Venezuela shouldn't have let its economy become so dependent on the single export industry of oil." 

Clownwashing

 Susie Wiles's unexpectedly revealing interview with Vanity Fair this week is being widely interpreted as an unforced error on the administration's part. In the course of the discussion, Wiles reportedly offered a shocking number of seemingly unvarnished opinions on her colleagues—most of which have been interpreted as damaging for the administration she serves. All of this has left many media observers baffled as to what Wiles was thinking. 

I wonder though—for my part—if there wasn't something more calculated behind this. Yes, Wiles in the interview did offer a lot of apparently damning verdicts on her boss and his friends: Trump has an "alcoholic's personality"; Vance is implied to be a cynical opportunist who made a heel-turn in his political convictions in order to advance his career; Musk is a weirdo who sleeps during the daytime; Vought is a right-wing extremist; etc. 

Court Intrigue

 When the news broke yesterday about Trump's name showing up in the Epstein emails, I confess that I mostly just rubbed my palms together in typical Resistance lib glee. "Oohoo boy, looks like more bad news for Trump! Gimme gimme!" I said. 

A friend called me up shortly afterward, though, to say: "actually, I think we just lost the midterms." The latest round of Epstein headlines—in his view—were the best thing that could have happened to Trump; and the worst that could have happened to Democrats. 

Do tell, I said.