Category: US

A World Without History

Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’ New York Times, Jan. 12, 2019

“STEVENS POINT, Wis. — Chancellor Bernie Patterson’s message to his campus was blunt: To remain solvent and relevant, his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself. Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, French and German, would be eliminated. Career-focused programs would become a key investment. Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Dr. Patterson explained in a memo, could “no longer be all things to all people.” Dr. Patterson’s plan came as Stevens Point and many other public universities in rural America face a crisis. Such colleges have served as anchors for their regions, educating generations of residents. Now student enrollment has plummeted, money from states has dropped and demographic trends promise even worse days ahead.”

America and China: new enemies?

From today’s South China Morning Post:

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs has said diplomacy is needed between the US and China to prevent “utter disaster” as he defended his controversial criticism of Washington’s targeting of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies.
The Columbia University professor faced a firestorm of criticism on social media after he accused the US of hypocrisy for its targeting of Huawei senior executive Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested by the Canadian authorities last month at the behest of the US.
“The US attacks on Huawei, in my view, are not about Huawei’s actions but about technological competition,” Sachs said on Tuesday.
“I don’t think we should take claims against Huawei by the US at face value.”
“We need diplomacy to stop an IT arms race,” he said. “Right now we are on the path to disastrous cyberwarfare.
“This is reckless and should not be left to the hardliners on both sides. We need global rules, globally supervised, just as in the areas of other armaments.”
He added that the US targeting of Chinese firms should be seen against the background of the Trump administration’s attempt to assert American “exceptionalism” and to fight the perceived challenge of China and Russia to US power.
“It is a very dangerous and utterly false idea that China is ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity,’” he said, referring to the US national security doctrine issued by the White House a year ago.
Sachs warned that conflicts like the continuing trade war and the targeting of Chinese IT firms “recall an early era of great power confrontation that eventually led to utter disaster”.
“China is not America’s enemy, unless such zero-sum thinking by the [US government] drives China in that direction … China is not a malevolent actor to be ‘contained’ by the US.
“China is a great and rightly proud civilisation that aims for the prosperity of its people. China and the US have every reason to cooperate. It would be insane and utterly self-destructive to do otherwise,” he said.

 

 

The Enemy In-Chief

Since its foundation the US has always had an enemy in-chief. First it was the British who helped to solder the nation together. Then came the extermination of the American Indians extending the American territories “from sea to shining sea.”. Then the civil war when the Americans made mortal enemies of each other with wounds that are still not fully healed. Then came the Spanish, the Germans (twice), the Russians, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq,

Now it appears that a new enemy in-chief has come into sight. Today it is China’s turn. A new act in a deeply dangerous game.

Trouble in Paradise

The small city of Paradise has been consumed by one of those California forest fires that are becoming only too frequent. Dozens of people have died. Meanwhile, we have been choking in the polluted air 200 miles away. Last year, close friends almost lost their house in the fires that raged around Santa Rosa.

Who can we blame but ourselves? Our freeways are clogged by millions of cars; we fly across continents for business or pleasure; we maintain polluting industries in order to keep the economy going. When our politicians prove unable or unwilling to take action they only reflect our own attitudes. Living in Berkeley, I find myself surrounded by “environmentalists,” but they still burn their woodfires in their chimneys even on the worst bad-air days. Official “Spare the air” alerts are a joke. They are backed up by nothing and largely ignored.

We are changing the air all around us; not only its quality but also its currents. And so the clouds that used to bring rain do not come any more. One year of drought is followed by another and only occasionally do we have a genuine rainy season. No wonder that forests dry out, that trees are attacked by diseases and insects, and that firestorms consume houses, neighborhoods, and entire cities.

And how about democracy?

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Crown Publishing, New York 2018

Are we facing today the twilight of democracy? Patrick E. Kennon, a retired CIA analyst, argued this point more than twenty years ago in a book entitled The Twilight of Democracy. On the front of its dustcover it said: “Those societies that continue to allow themselves to be administered by individuals whose only qualification is that they were able to win a popularity contest will go from failure to failure and eventually pass from the scene.” On the back cover it added: “Washington isn’t the problem – Democracy is.” Kennon was convinced that democracy had reached its expiration date even though it was still being touted as an ideology. Democracy, he wrote, “is an earthbound, human creation subject to the entropy of all such creations. It now travels a course of declining relevance much like that of the European monarchy from the power of Elizabeth I to the impotence of Elizabeth II.” (p. 255) Replacing democracy, he foresaw, would be a new elite of experts: military, administrative, and private-sector specialists who would administer the state of the future in a bureaucratic fashion. Under such a scenario, he concluded that by 2050 the developed, first world “would have largely retired its politicians. The internal affairs of the country would be run by faceless but expert bureaucrats under the general supervision of equally faceless representatives of the population as a whole.” (p. 279)

It’s not obvious that Kennon’s vision is coming true. Today we are being ruled by a shaky business man who has convinced his followers that he is a master at making deals. He is also a media figure who has learned to stir their emotions into political frenzy. He may not be much of a democrat but he is also certainly not a faceless expert specialist operating an anonymous bureaucracy. We seem to be traveling on a different road from the one Kennon saw ahead. But he seems to have been proved right in assuming that the future of democracy is by no means assured. The result of this realization has led to a spate of recent books entitled The Crisis of Democracy, The Plot to Destroy America, Democracy in Decline?, How Democracy Ends, and Democracy: The God that Failed.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is another contribution to this genre. Its title is, however, somewhat misleading in that the book is largely concerned with the United States. Its central question is to what extent Donald Trump represents a threat to American democracy and what to do about it – with illustrative references to the failure of democracies in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, post-Communist Russia, Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela, and passing references to various other places. This perspective structures but also limits the authors’ discussion of how democracies may fail. Their eye is on internal forces for failure; they are not concerned with the collapse of democracies due to foreign interventions, to military, economic, or environmental disaster, or to ideological and religious rifts. And their explanations are given in psychological terms: the authoritarian personality, the need for toleration and forbearance, the dangers of radical opposition in that it might provoke a political reaction. They do not ask whether there are structural changes in society that are destabilizing the democratic order

Levitsky and Ziblatt see American democracy threatened above all by the rise of an authoritarian figure who is set to undermine existing political institutions and practices. They identify four indicators of authoritarian behavior: 1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game. 2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents. 3. Toleration or encouragement of violence. 4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media. And they then proceed to document all four of these behavior patterns in Donald Trump. Trump is therefore on their view a serious threat to American democracy.

The two authors allow that authoritarian personalities exist in every society but, they argue, healthy democracies have procedures for keeping them in check. These are not, however, to be found in the existence of a written Constitution. “There is nothing in our Constitution or our culture,” they write, “to immunize us against democratic breakdown.” (p. 204) Other checks are needed to bring this about. The first is the fostering of a spirit of toleration and forbearance. If democracy is to work, political opponents must be respected as citizens and not be treated as enemies to be suppressed. And politicians need to restrain the use of their power so a not to undermine the democratic system for the sake of their own cause. In Levitsky and Ziblatt’s telling, the Republican and Democratic Parties have in the past served as “guardrails” that have kept American democracy in place by fostering these two fundamental political virtues. Through a process of selection and vetting of presidential candidates, the two parties have managed to keep authoritarians more or less at bay. The existence of political parties has thus proved essential for the survival of democracy. But the Republican and Democratic Parties have become less powerful in recent decades and they have therefore increasingly lost their guardrail function. This is due, the two authors think, to a polarization affecting all of American society and politics. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme polarization – one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.” (p. 9)

The authors sketch three possible scenarios for post-Trump America. The first, optimistic one, is that Trump will fail and that the Trump interlude will be “taught in schools, recounted in films, and recited in historical works as an era of tragic mistakes where catastrophe was avoided and American democracy saved.” (p. 206) But they are not convinced that the end of Trump’s presidency will be enough to restore a healthy democracy. “A second much darker future is one in which President Trump and the Republicans continue to win with a white nationalistic appeal.” (p. 207) This would, of course, not be possible in a democratic way. Levitsky and Ziblatt are, however, convinced that – conceivable as it is – “such a nightmare scenario isn’t likely.” (p. 208) There remains a third possibility. “The third, and in our view, most likely post-Trump future is one marked by polarization, more departures from unwritten political conventions, and increasing institutional warfare – in other words, democracy without solid guardrails.” (p. 208) Levitsky and Ziblatt call this also a scenario in which democracy is left in a half-life state.

They proceed to consider how such a development may be prevented. They argue that it would be wrong for the opposition to use the same hardball tactics adopted by Trump and his Republican followers. They write: “In our view, the idea that Democrats should ‘fight like Republicans’ is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggest that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.” (pp. 215-216) The advice seems plausible, but it fails to address the question whether there will not be a point at which only all-out opposition can be effective. Clearly, America is not at this point and so Levitsky and Ziblatt’s reasonably suggest that “opposition to the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior should be muscular but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the courts, and, of course, elections.” (pp. 217-218) So, not violence in the streets, but maintenance of the democratic values of toleration and forbearance in the building of broad opposition coalitions.

But the two authors understand that resistance to the abuses of the Trump administration is not enough. They believe, rather, that “the fundamental problem facing American democracy remains extreme partisan division – one fueled not just by policy differences but by deeper sources of resentment, including racial and religious differences.” They are convinced that “America’s great polarization preceded the Trump presidency, and it is very likely to endure beyond it.” (p. 220) They see the Republican Party as the main driver of the political chasm that has opened up. Hence: “Reducing polarization requires that the Republican Party be reformed, if not refounded outright.” (p. 223) And Democrats must address the problem of economic and social inequality. “The very health of our democracy hinges on it.” (p. 230)

Important as these considerations are, Levitsky and Ziblatt do not pursue them far enough to come to a compelling analysis of the state of democracy in the 21st century and particularly that of US American democracy. One obstacle on the way is their tendency to describe the situation in binary terms, as if there was a clear choice between being authoritarian and being democratic. Neither authoritarianism nor democracy is one thing; there are different degrees and forms of each and the two even occasionally overlap as in the so-called peoples-democracies of the Soviet era. Moreover, not every form of government is viable at any given moment. There are external constraints that make one system more viable than another at a given time. Thus, the radical democracy known to the Athenian state of the fourth century is not possible for us. Levitsky and Ziblatt follow mainline American thinking when they conceive the matter in an essentially voluntarist fashion. It is all a matter of choice for them. We must get ourselves into the right (democratic and anti-authoritarian) state of mind and then act according to its dictates. It’s all a matter of good will.

But we should ask ourselves what the constraints are under which modern democracy has developed and how and why these may be changing – and how then we are to proceed in this shifting terrain. The rise of Donald Trump is linked to an accumulation of wealth made possible by new technologies, to a globally operating financial system, and to the messaging power of the electronic media. The concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian leaders parallels and is accomplished through the accumulation of economic, financial, and informational power. The important point to understand is that we are not  facing just another authoritarian in Donald Trump, but a newly evolving form of authoritarianism. Reforming America’s political parties and striving for greater equality and less polarization may be good things, but they are not enough in the face of a newly forming system of political power.

Political Realism vs. Political Realism

Trump must be a puzzle to our political realists. He certainly shares their scorn for seeing politics in moral terms. Unlike George W. Bush, he doesn’t speak of an axis of evil in the world; and unlike Obama and the Democrats, he is little concerned with the issue of human rights. As an amoral capitalist he believes in self-interest and the exercise of power, in the use and pursuit of money in politics.

But he is also not much interested in the actual political realities. He sticks to a simple picture of what the world is like, despises experts, and ignores advice. In his factual claims he is often quite unrealistic.

Trump makes us understand that the term “political realism” is ambiguous. In one sense it is a general belief about how human beings act and a set of policies derived from this. In another sense it refers to the recognition of the concrete facts on the political ground. Trump shows us that the two don’t necessarily go together. Political realism can, in other words, go hand in hand with a lack of realism.

Donald Trump’s Biggest Mistake

Donald Trump has already made some serious political mistakes. He gave the Israelis their much desired American embassy in Jerusalem without asking for any concessions from them on the thorny Palestinian issue. Not a very good case of deal-making.  And in a similar fashion he gave the North Korean leader his sought-after recognition as an international statesman without getting from him any firm commitments on the nuclear issue. There are other such failures but, significant as they may be, none of them is really Trump’s most egregious mistake.

Some people might, of course, argue that Trump’s biggest mistake was to enter politics at all and to run for the presidency. It has certainly become clear by now that he was not and is not qualified for the position. So, he wants to shake things up and be a disruptor. But what is to be put in place when the old order has been destroyed? Trump’s vision is woefully inadequate in this respect. It comes to a recreation of the United States of the 1950’s: predominantly white, equipped with heavy industries, economically and military unchallenged, and conservative in attitudes and tastes. But history doesn’t repeat itself and a quite different constellation of issues face the country now in the 21st millennium.

Trump’s biggest mistake has been and is, rather, his unrelenting aggressiveness. There was, in particular, no reason for him to turn on Barack Obama and make himself the central figure in the so-called “birther” campaign. The whole thing was a fake, in any case. Does it matter whether Obama was born in Hawaii or abroad? He was certainly born as the son of a US citizen and therefore held citizenship rights from the moment of birth. That is all the Constitution demands from an American president. And the claim that Obama was not born where his birth certificate says he was, was an absurdity from the beginning. Given Obama’s popularity then and now Trump’s actions unnecessarily alienated all those for whom Obama was the symbol of a new post-racist America. They have found his anti-Obama agitation utterly unforgivable. The same unnecessary aggressiveness Trump manifested in his campaign against Hillary Clinton with nicknaming her “Crooked Hillary” and leading choruses of “Lock her up.”

We can be sure that the ongoing Russia investigation would not have become such a heated partisan matter without Trump’s animus against Obama and Clinton. He could, of course, have changed his tone once he was elected; but he proved unable for such a gesture. He has injected in this way a new nastiness into American politics and that may well be his biggest mistake and failure in politics.

“The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization – one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture… And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.” (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die)

How inequality is increasing

Here is an easily understood series of graphics on the state of the American economy. Put together by the Wall Street Journal, it shows that the wealth distribution in America has changed dramatically from 2004 to 2016. The top 1% now own 5% more of wealth and the bottom 90% now own 6% less. Look at the rest of the graphics and you get some idea of why this has happened.

https://graphics.wsj.com/how-the-world-has-changed-since-2008-financial-crisis/

The Soviet Union is alive and well — in the USA

Conformism is a danger to any society, including democratic ones. The Americans, who pride themselves on their individualism, are, in fact, often quite conformist in their behavior. Look at the American cities or how people dress and what they eat, and you discover a great deal of conformity. Strangely enough, that conformism can go hand-in-hand with the belief that you are free, independent, and your own individual person.

Conformism is also a political problem and a political danger. Read this article, watch the embedded video, and decide for yourself. https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490

The place of America — in political philosophy

For those living in the United States, the conditions of American politics will, for obvious reasons, be of some interest. But given the economic, political, and military power of the US it is not surprising to discover that American politics is scrutinized all over the world. When one looks at the International media, it is striking how much attention they pay to American affairs.

Does this mean that American politics has also a particular interest for political philosophy? Well, certainly, as an exemplar of politics for American students of political philosophy. John Rawls’ classic Theory of Justice seems to have largely America in view, despite its aspirations of providing a universal theory.

It is also said that America’s political history provides a blueprint for the natural and perhaps even inevitable political development of other places in the world. In this story, the American republic and American democracy are assumed to be suitable paradigms for political order and practice everywhere else. But is this assumption realistic or will countries like China, for instance, always be following their own trajectory and one that does not necessarily lead to American style democracy? We must not forget that historically different countries have served as political models — ancient democratic Athens, Imperial Rome, and Revolutionary France. The role of America as a model for political development is by no means set in stone.

Another possibility is that because of its wealth and power the US is still serving the role of an avant-garde nation. Whatever happens here politically and economically, will eventually manifest itself in other parts of the world. So, if we find extreme forms of capitalism in the US or a deterioration of democratic life, similar forms of corruption are to be expected elsewhere. One immediate application of this thought is that the rise of Donald Trump signals a process that may extend to the rest of the world and has to be therefore of interest to political philosophy.

 

A Bad Bargain

Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Penguin Books 2017, republished with a new preface 2018

Joshua Green’s book has been somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Read more) but it adds significantly to Wolff’s account and corrects it at some important points. It tells in fascinating detail the story of bad bargain the American people accepted when they elected Trump.

Green, shows, in particular, how doggedly Trump had been pursuing the project of a presidential campaign. Over long years he had “developed many of the themes that became hallmarks of the eventual campaign – everything from the evils of Chinese currency manipulation to the economic damage that NAFTA inflicted on a broad swath of U. S. workers.” (p. 41) When Trump and Bannon finally met they discovered that “both believed, for instance, that the United States was constantly victimized in foreign trade deals.” (p. 93)

Green, whose book is based on extensive interviews with Bannon himself and his associates as well as with others in Trump’s circle, gives much credit to Bannon for Trump’s victory. He writes that “Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon. Together their power and reach gave them strength and influence far beyond what either could have achieved on his own.” (p. 22) In a word, Bannon provided for Trump his own “hard-right nationalist politics” and “Trump sold this brand of nationalism with the same all-out conviction he brought to selling his own name. Whether he actually believed in it, he recognized that it was the key to closing the biggest deal of his life.” (p. xxix) It was Bannon, Green argues, who “supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed ‘America First’ nationalism.” (p. 46) After their break, Trump sought, of course, to minimize the importance of Bannon for his presidential campaign. “Steve had very little to do with our historical victory,” he declared. (p. xxi)

Given Green’s premise of the importance of Bannon to Trump, it is obvious why he focuses so intensely on Bannon and his worldview — even more so than on Trump. Bannon is, in his eyes, clearly the more complex and more interesting character. Like Michael Wolff after him, Green highlights the volatility of Bannon’s career which took him from serving for seven years in the navy to Goldman Sachs as a banker, Hollywood and movie-making, two years spent on an anti-Clinton crusade, editor of Breitbart News and finally presidential adviser. Both authors also acknowledge the importance of Bannon’s Irish Catholic working-class background. But there are some differences in the two accounts. Green’s Bannon is more successful than Wolff’s and his development is more coherent. Green also makes much of Bannon’s long-standing preoccupation with Hillary Clinton and the ways he sought to undermine her.

 

Who is responsible for our decline? – The Frankfurt School, of course.

Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss. The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Verso, London 2017

Poor Frankfurt School. Turn to the internet these days and you realize that the handful of German professors who go under that name are being held responsible for almost everything bad that has happened to society since … when? !990? 1970? 1945? Or even 1920? All these dates are being tossed around on those feverish websites. Neo-Marxism, cultural Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, sexual excess, postmodernism, political correctness, and all in all the entire “Western decline” are due to their nefarious doings.

According to our new alt-right friends, the Frankfurt and cultural Marxist philosophy“now controls Western intellectualism, politics and culture. It was by design; it was created by an internationalist intelligentsia to eradicate Western values, social systems, and European racial groups in a pre-emptive attempt to spark global communist revolution.” (Click here) This discovery is, actually, a bit late. The Lyndon LaRouche folks have been saying much the same for the last quarter of a century. Walter Benjamin, the seemingly hapless Frankfurt intellectual – they have been saying – has in reality been the ultimate puppet master of modern civilization, responsible for everything from a bad turn in literary theory to bad TV. “Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the Frankfurt School’s successes was the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control which they represent today. This grew out of the work originally done by … Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.” (Click here) What else would you expect from those nefarious German-Jewish intellectuals?

Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss is an indispensable antidote to such fevered excesses. It traces the lives of the members of the Frankfurt School from 1900 to the new millennium and of the school itself from its uncertain beginnings in Frankfurt in the 1920’s, through its exile in America, to its eventual return to Germany. Jeffries’ story reveals how marginalized the Frankfurt School people were right from the moment of the foundation of their institute, how they were forced to relocate the institute first to Geneva and then to New York to save it from Hitler’s powerful grip. In the US, the Frankfurt scholars found it difficult to get adjusted and while some of them stayed after the war, the two leading figures, Horkheimer and Adorno, returned to Frankfurt only to be caught up in the cultural and political turmoil of the late 1960’s. At no point did they succeed in establishing a hegemony over intellectual, cultural, and academic affairs or, for that matter, over the political debate. Benjamin committed suicide while trying to escape the Nazis; Adorno died of a heart attack after being confronted by rebellious left-wing students.

How far does the academic influence of the Frankfurt School in fact reach? Certainly not very far into Anglo-American philosophy departments which are still predominantly positivistic and analytic in outlook. If we are to look for foreign influences in those places we must turn to the logicians, linguistic philosophers, and philosophers of science of the Vienna Circle, not to the Frankfurt School. Certainly also not in political science departments which are mostly dedicated to “government studies” and have typically only a few “theorists” in their ranks. Certainly not in Sociology department. The sociologist Robert Dunn in a recent book complains bitterly about “the positivist tendencies and narrow scientific preoccupations … which have prevailed within the disciplinary mainstream at the expense of engagement with the social and human problems engendered by modern capitalist society.” (Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2018, p. vii) And it’s not a turn to the Frankfurt School he calls for but to the all-American pragmatist John Dewey. We can go through the roster of humanities and social science departments across America and may find a smattering of Frankfurt School influence, but the mainstream remains firmly committed to positivistic, hermeneutic, historical, and traditional scholarly modes of thinking.

Jeffries tells his story in a lively fashion. I certainly kept on reading — though with reservations. The problem is that like any number of books these days Jeffries’ focuses on biography and human psychology and treats the accomplishments of the biographed figures only as incidental. Jeffries spends much of the first chapter to establish that the founders of the Frankfurt School were motivated by Oedipal feelings against their fathers. He calls Walter Benjamin the School’s greatest thinker but never really explains to us what makes him so great. The ideas that made the Frankfurt School famous are never elaborated. When it comes to basic Frankfurt School concepts like those of “dialectic” and “reification” Jeffries falls back on sketchy and wholly unsatisfactory characterizations. In the end, I was ready to reach for a classic like Martin Jay’s book The Dialectical Imagination to help me with understanding what made the Frankfurt School so interesting.