Slow-Motion Munich

 Ever since Trump came back into office, people have been warning that it seems like he is planning to betray Ukraine. But, no matter how inevitable it seemed that Trump would eventually pull a Neville Chamberlain and cut a deal with Putin to hand our ally over to the country that was invading them, the decisive moment never quite came. Instead, Trump would at times appear to suddenly and radically undermine our relationship with Ukraine; but then, the next day, he would backpedal. And so the cycle would continue. 

For all we know, Trump's remarks yesterday may not have been his final word on the subject either. Mere days from now, he may patch things up with Zelensky yet again and pivot to offering another round of halfhearted praise for our ally. Whatever Trump may do from day to day, however, the larger pattern is unmistakable at this point: he really is walking away from Ukraine, by whatever fits and starts. He may be acting less precipitously than Neville Chamberlain did in 1938—but this is still a Munich in slow motion. 

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. 

The Shah

 Now, in the midst of Trump's ongoing war in the Middle East, seemed like a particularly apt time to pick up Ryszard Kapuściński's classic book of reportage on Iranian politics, Shah of Shahs. 

The book convincingly and indelibly portrays the Shah's former regime as a nightmare state of total despotism, in which neighbors feared to confide in neighbors, lest they find themselves reported to the authorities, and the deadly Savak secret police exercised a reign of terror over the public. 

Undesirable Ally

 Just when I was starting to legitimately like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan (his response to J.D. Vance's attacks was masterful), he's let me down by once again failing to distance himself from a rather unsavory admirer. 

As the New York Times reported earlier this week, just days after a number of Jewish leaders in Michigan had said they would endorse El-Sayed in spite of certain misgivings, Tucker Carlson has come out as an improbable (or perhaps not so improbable) defender of the Democratic candidate.

Where Are You on 9/11?

 Today marks 25 years since 9/11, and every commentator and newspaper editorial board will be penning obligatory pieces on the meaning of the attacks and the way they reshaped the world over the last quarter-century. Matt Yglesias, in a podcast episode this week on the subject, kicked off his reflections by quipping something like, "so—9/11 was bad." The joke being that this is such an obvious and universal sentiment that it hardly passes for a "take."

But of course—and however strangely—it's not actually a universal sentiment. One of the biggest political controversies of the summer revolved around a years-old remark from leftist bro streamer Hasan Piker asserting that "America deserved 9/11" (Piker later disavowed the comment as "inappropriate" and quibbled "I didn't say Americans deserved 9/11—I said America deserves 9/11"—which is an interesting and perhaps not entirely hollow distinction; we'll return to that later). 

AfD

 The disturbingly strong showing for the far-right AfD party in Germany's state elections in Saxony-Anhalt over the weekend fortunately does not immediately change anything about the policies of the German central government. Nor does it presage some inexorable global tide of the extreme right (the AfD is strongest only in historically depressed ex-Communist areas of the country, not nationwide). 

Still, I do think these results underscore that electoral politics across the West are no longer a contest between the center-right and the center-left as we once knew them. Rather, the struggle is between a loose coalition of anti-fascist parties, and a resurgent populist far-right that is deeply xenophobic, wears its historical ties to European fascism on its sleeves, talks about mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, and displays a weird affinity for Vladimir Putin. 

Capitol of the Lost Republic

 I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"

But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul. 

Rivals and Borrowers

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein podcast from last week was devoted to a somewhat panicky discussion of an allegedly impending "China Shock 2.0." 

As Klein and his guest describe it, China is poised to overtake the rest of the world not only in the manufacturing of cheap consumer goods of the sort we associate with the first "China Shock"—but in the industrial production of just about everything else—including the most important "technologies of the future"—EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels—maybe AI and humanoid robots too, to give the more headline-grabbing examples? 

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. 

A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

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. 

Still Dos Passos's U.S.A.

 One of my reading projects for the summer has been to finish John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and I just did last night. There are obviously many things one could say about an epic of that scale, but what came to mind for me in reading the last volume of the trilogy (The Big Money), was that our 2020s are coming to resemble very much the 1920s of a century ago that Dos Passos describes. We are still Dos Passos's America—and not in a good way. 

The trilogy as a whole is an elegy for the "lost republic" of Jeffersonian democracy, to use Dos Passos's phrase—the "storybook democracy" of Walt Whitman, as he elsewhere calls it. Beginning with a sympathetic depiction of I.W.W. labor radicalism at the turn of the century, Dos Passos charts the inexorable rise of big business and the dulling of conscience and moral values, as people find themselves duped into a needless war in Europe that is then cynically exploited by business interests. 

Data Centers

 In a podcast interview earlier this week about the current populist backlash against AI data centers, Jasmine Sun and Ezra Klein started off by trying to explain what it is like to actually live in the vicinity of one of these facilities. "What do they sound like?" Klein asked. Sun replied: "they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring."

B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R!

What are the machines saying, a hundred of them in one long room?

They must be talking to themselves, for I see no one else for them to talk to.

Proletarian Voters?

 The "dirtbag" stream of the Left seems to be taking a victory lap after the results were finally announced in the Senate Democratic primary election in Michigan yesterday. They view Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's win as a vindication of the whole macho, aggro, "up yours" brand of politics they have been wanting to see take over the Left for a long time. 

"Chuck Schumer Eats Shit," was Ken Klippenstein's headline yesterday, responding to these events. So much for that "now is the time for everyone to come together and focus on the general election" speech that El-Sayed gave yesterday. 

Successive Degrees of Unfreedom

 I'm sorry to keep going on about André Brink's A Dry White Season. But I wish that our government wouldn't keep proving my point for me that it feels more and more by the day that we are living in a political situation very much like the one he depicts in the novel. 

The book is about apartheid South Africa—and everyone knows these days that apartheid South Africa was an authoritarian state. 

Swift on War and Alliances

 Since we are still apparently stuck in the middle of Trump's illegal, futile, and endless war on Iran, I turned to Jonathan Swift's 1711 anti-war tract, The Conduct of the Allies, in the hope that it might have some wisdom to teach our present generation. 

Alas, I found the essay far less ideologically congenial than I had hoped. Swift's pamphlet argues in favor of a treaty over the continuance of war, but it is far from a pacifist tract. Indeed, Swift offers essentially no humanitarian arguments against war. Instead, his arguments rest almost entirely on appeals to gut-level selfishness and the pocket-book. (And I remind you what Mencius had to say about that.)

Apartheid States

 The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset. 

Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)

His Prominence

 For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator. 

Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.).