History – Page 2 – The Wrongologist

About That Debate

The Daily Escape:

Rainstorm, Blue Ridge Mountains, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC – June 2024 photo by David R. Robinson

It’s a new day and we’re trying to pick up the pieces after what happened in last night’s debate between Trump and Biden. Here’s a recap by Rick Wilson, Lincoln Project co-founder:

“It’s late June, and Joe Biden went on stage with a felon who tore down America, told 500 sundry lies, bragged about ending Roe v. Wade, defended January 6th, denied having sex with a porn star, and promised to betray Ukraine. And Joe Biden had a bad, bad night.”

Biden stumbled over his words, and Trump’s barrage of lies went unchecked. On Twitter and on cable news, the political pundit class had a collective freakout. From political journalist John Nichols:

“CNN is illustrating how a ‘debate’ when the moderators reject the basic responsibility of fact-checking in real time, and refuse to challenge blatantly false statements, is not a debate. It’s…chaos where lies are given equal footing with the truth.”

When Wrongo heard that CNN wouldn’t be doing any real time fact-checking on Thursday afternoon, it was clear how the debate would go. Only now, the Democrats and Biden can’t tell people they didn’t see what they saw.

A lot of media people are SHOCKED at Biden’s performance. Dem consultants see that there is blood in the water and the sharks are circling. So many senior Dems are saying that Biden should step aside. The options are pretty simple:

Convince Biden to drop out of the race.
Stick with Biden and hope his debate performance doesn’t turn many voters away.

There are LOTS of Dems who want option #1. But it will be impossible to get Biden to drop out if he doesn’t want to do it. And there are NO signs that he wants to it.

Any plan to ease Biden out would likely require the involvement of Jill Biden and Barack Obama, along with assembling a pre-fab, pre-convention ticket acceptable to the Party’s delegates.

Otherwise, it would be a free-for-all. Even with Biden and Obama’s backing, that’s a huge undertaking with a 10 out of 10 degree of difficulty. It also entails massive risk with the convention delegates, the public, along with the challenges of spinning up a presidential campaign from a standing start. No Democrat on the sidelines today has the national organization in place to make a credible presidential run. They would have to take over the Biden campaign’s assets and move on from there.

Get a grip: One candidate on the stage lied from start to finish. And no one is suggesting that he drop out.

The media has been on the verge of burying Biden because of his age for months. That was never more true than on CNN on Thursday night, where their coifed pundit-moderators ignored the elephants in the room – that one of the two men standing at the podiums was a convicted felon, the leader of a coup attempt, an alleged thief of national security documents, who was earlier this year found liable in a civil court for rape, and has promised to usher in a vengeful authoritarian regime if he returns to office.

Instead, they launched the debate with their usual dead horse: the deficit and taxes. More from Wilson:

“History is replete with bad debate performances: Clinton’s first outing in 1992, George W. Bush’s Boston groaner (I was there, and it was awful), and Obama’s first showing against John McCain. Debates matter until they don’t, but they matter most to the chattering and online classes.”

All of those debaters won the presidency.

Biden is still overwhelmingly likely to run for reelection; he’s still is in a position to be re-elected. Biden, even diminished, is more right than wrong, that at this point he represents the Party’s best chance to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.

Biden did the best he could with an opponent who is unconstrained by the truth and moderators perfectly willing to allow Trump to lie. Unfortunately while Biden started weak, he finished stronger, while Trump started strong, he finished weak.

But Wrongo assumes that many people stopped watching after the first break.

So while some Democrats are in a panic about Joe Biden’s debate performance, we need to get a clue and check in with reality. It was probable that Biden was unwell and fatigued. Imagine how well you’d perform under the same conditions, regardless of your age.

Swallow your panic and get to work, doing whatever you can. Because for many Americans, this is personal. Your guy had a bad night. But the sun is out today. Move forward. Stop being afraid of your own shadow. We’re running against an insurrectionist and a felon. Biden is old. Stop being afraid of it.

We’re having our Saturday Soother on Friday this week, for the obvious reason that it’s necessary. On the Fields of Wrong, a very large tree fell across the long driveway of two of our neighbors. It says a lot that five or so of the men in the neighborhood worked together over two days to reopen the road. It did require borrowed and rented capital equipment: a scoop loader, a tractor and a wood chipper.

It’s going to be a cooler and drier Friday and Saturday in Connecticut. So let’s grab a seat in the shade and do our best not to think about the Supreme Court’s continuing efforts to end democracy as we used to know it. Try instead to take a few moments to gather ourselves for the slings and arrows of the week to come.

Start by listening to “Uncle John’s Band” by the Grateful Dead. It started appearing in their concerts in1969. The band recorded it for their 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead”. It was written by guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter. The tune was played more than 330 times by the Dead and the lyrics seem to Wrongo to be valuable today:

Sample Lyrics:

Well, the first days are the hardest days
Don’t you worry anymore
‘Cause when life looks like Easy Street
There is danger at your door
Think this through with me
Let me know your mind
Woah, oh, what I want to know
Is are you kind?

Goddamn, well, I declare
Have you seen the like?
Their walls are built of cannonballs
Their motto is “don’t tread on me”

Come hear Uncle John’s band
Playing to the tide
Come with me, or go alone
He’s come to take his children home

Those Remaining Supreme Court Decisions

The Daily Escape:

Dinghies and roses, Kennebunkport, ME – June 2024 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Glad to be back! Wrongo and Ms. Right spent a long weekend with family in Napa, CA.

This week should see many more decisions announced by the Supreme Court. The National Review has the remaining lineup:

“There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2.”

And NR’s Dan McLaughlin gives us a scorecard of which justices have written this term’s opinions:

“…Justice Sonia Sotomayor has thus far published seven opinions representing the decision of the Court, and Justice Clarence Thomas six; it will be surprising if we get more from Thomas and more surprising if we get more from Sotomayor. By contrast, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch have each published just two opinions with the decision of the Court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett three; they will likely have more….There’s only one case left from…November — Rahimi, the Second Amendment case — and the likeliest author of that opinion is either Roberts or Elena Kagan, neither of whom have published an opinion for the Court from the cases argued in that sitting.”

So much for analyzing the lineup. The real issue remaining is what the Supremes are going to do with the presidential immunity case, Trump v. United States. It’s taken so long to hear from the Court on this that many are suspicious. From Leah Litman at the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.”

Litman reminds us of the history of the case:

“On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear…Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.”

Now nearly two months have passed since the immunity case was argued , long enough to remove the possibility of either the stolen documents case or the Jan. 6 case even being started before the November election. More from Litman:

“…indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election.”

FYI, the Nixon tapes case was decided 16 days after oral argument. Michael Podhorzer calls the decision delay election interference:

“By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.”

But, according to Podhorzer, the Supreme Court’s actions have actually been worse than that:

“At no point since World War II has there been a 5-4 partisan ruling to make elections more democratic – not to expand voting rights, limit campaign finance, or constrain gerrymandering.”

He also reminds us that the problem started with Bush v. Gore:

“Beginning with Bush v. Gore, on at least a dozen occasions, SCOTUS has radically altered election law on a partisan 5-4 or 6-3 basis – often overriding bipartisan legislation enacted by Congress, and often relying on spurious facts or questions not even presented in the cases.”

Podhorzer includes the following graph showing the number of important election-related rulings each Court made, broken down by the ideology of the justices. The dark blue represents liberal consensus rulings; the dark red represents conservative rulings where the majority consisted only of Republican nominees:

Podhorzer closes with a very interesting analysis of how the Court has been hijacked by the Federalist Society and the Conservative Right, such that recent appointments to the Supreme Court have not reflected the demographics of the nation: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only five of the 116 justices to serve on the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by senators representing less than one half of the US population. Only John Roberts among current GOP justices was confirmed by senators representing a clear majority of Americans.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Furthermore, of all the justices to serve in the last century and a half, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only ones to have been named by a president who did not win the popular vote.”

This is the tyranny of the minority, and yet another reason why the November election is so important: It’s likely that the next president will appoint at least two new justices.

And our way out of the currently tipped scales of justice by the growing corrupt autocratic cabal at the Supreme Court begins with Democratic voters understanding the stakes when they go to the polls.

Otherwise, we’re sleepwalking toward authoritarianism.

We Can’t Sit Back. We Must Become Activists

The Daily Escape:

Doll House, Bears Ears National Monument, UT – June 2024 photo by Robert Villegas

Over the weekend, Wrongo and Ms. Right along with friends of the blog Gloria R., Pat M. and David P. saw the play “Suffs” on Broadway, NYC.

The plot is that it’s 1913 and the women’s movement is trying to get women the right to vote. They are organized by the suffragists, not suffragettes (they call themselves “Suffs”). “Suffs” traces their heroic and occasionally dangerous campaign from 1913 through ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. There’s a schism in the movement between the conservative old-line establishment Suffs, and a youthful breakaway group who want to emulate a similar movement in England, led in the US by Alice Paul who briefly spent time in the UK.

Paul and her group confront then-president Woodrow Wilson, who, after jailing the Paul group and allowing them to nearly die in a hunger strike, eventually tumbles to supporting the Suffs’ cause.

So much has changed since the passing of the 19th Amendment over a century ago, and yet this musical reminds us that we sometimes need to look back, in order to march into the future.

It was a sold out crowd. The audience was enthusiastic, and predominantly women. “Suffs” is a fantastic show that should be seen by anyone who loves Broadway, loves musicals, and needs a breath of hope in this bleak world. Like “Hamilton“, it invites us to learn something about the history of America. It’s a good show and it’s good for the world. Wrongo was emotional, remembering his time as an activist in the Civil Rights movement.

The show sets the stage early with the song, “Find A Way”:

How will we do it when it’s never been done?
How will we find the way where there isn’t one?

“Suffs” also makes us think about where we are today in America, along with what we can do to make it better. My lunch with the Broadway friends underlined that Democrats think it’s a scary time. Dan Pfeiffer wrote about how “Democrats are in a full-blown freakout over Biden”. Wrongo was the only one at lunch who thought that Biden has an excellent chance of winning in November. To paraphrase a line in the New Yorker by Lore Segal:

“The current situation is like two Democrats who are fighting a duel. On the count of ten, they turn and each shoots themselves in the foot”.

Democrats’ Grasp On Political Power Is Slipping

The Daily Escape:

Shiprock reflection, Shiprock, NM – May 2024 photo by Alex Spahn

Hope that everyone had a relaxing Memorial Day break. Despite our relaxing, time continued to march forward. And now some pundits are saying that America has entered the stretch run to the November presidential election. To a large extent, they’re correct. There’s only four months until early voting begins.

And its not just Trump we should be worrying about. At the moment, the Senate’s electoral map for November is grim for Democrats. They are certain to lose West Virginia, and the nine most competitive Senate races feature eight Democratic incumbents and Ted Cruz. And despite having a great Democrat (Colin Allred) running against Cruz, Texas may be the least likely to flip of those nine seats. So the odds on that are as long as drawing to an inside straight.

This brings up just how stacked against Democrats our Constitutional Republic has become. Fifteen years from now, states with 30% of the nation’s population will control 70% of the Senate’s seats. And the Senate is a legislative body where you need 60% of the votes (with certain exceptions) to bring a bill to the floor.

The difficult Senate map for 2024 means it is more likely than not that we may be kissing goodbye to adding additional progressive justices to the Supreme Court for some time, since a Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to ever confirm a Biden nominee. (That’s assuming Biden wins in the fall.)

And it’s become clear that the Supreme Court as currently constituted is completely unfriendly to making voting easy for the masses. And they’re doing that in support of the Republican agenda. As Mark Jacob reminds us:

“The court has made a series of key rulings in recent decades that have handed Republicans major advantages, including:

The Bush v. Gore decision to block a recount in Florida in 2000 and award George W. Bush the presidency

The Citizens United ruling of 2010 that was rocket fuel for the political influence of wealthy donors and corporations

A 2013 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts that gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for voter suppression laws

A 2019 pro-gerrymandering ruling also written by Roberts that let political parties draw election maps to their unfair advantage. (The court takes the position that it can strike down gerrymandering if it’s done for racially discriminatory reasons rather than partisan ones….”

Back in the day, we all wanted to believe that the Supreme Court was MOSTLY unbiased and above the political fray. We’re now painfully aware that this “pillar” of justice is simply a facade. Alito and Thomas are doing whatever they please.

Most recently, as Democracy Docket reported, the Supreme Court ruled that South Carolina’s congressional map is not a racial gerrymander, reversing a lower court decision that had earlier struck down the same map. That decision will result in worse representation for South Carolina’s Black voters. This is in stark contrast with a Louisiana district court’s decision in which the state’s white voters were able to get a racially compliant map struck down as a racial gerrymander, meaning that it too will now favor White representation for a Louisiana district.

This now means that the Supremes have kneecapped the ability of plaintiffs either to prove racial bias or to change gerrymandered districts on the basis of partisanship. Black voters are reaping what was sowed by Chief Justice John Roberts in his 2013 opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act. The president of the South Carolina NAACP, Brenda C. Murphy, said about Alito’s decision against South Carolina’s map:

“The Supreme Court has failed. The American people’s voting rights have taken another gut punch, and the future of democracy in South Carolina is dangling by a thread,”

As if this isn’t bad enough, Matt Cohen, also of Democracy Docket, reports on yet another Right-wing group organizing to disrupt the national election this fall. The group is called United Sovereign Americans (USA). They’re planning a series of lawsuits aimed at upending the voting process in a handful of states by claiming that non-citizens are voting in the federal election. Forget that there is nearly zero evidence for the claim, and that non-citizen voting is already forbidden by federal law.

In early March, United Sovereign Americans filed a lawsuit in Maryland challenging the state’s voter roll maintenance practices and other election procedures. The group says they plan to file similar lawsuits in at least nine states challenging election administration and voting laws. And although a federal judge tossed out the Maryland lawsuit, the group recently filed an appeal to the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The crux of USA’s argument is that inaccurate voter rolls lead to illegally cast votes, a civil rights violation because the US Constitution guarantees that right. The group’s claim is that when an election is marred by hundreds of thousands of illegal votes, it dilutes the power of lawful votes and violates the civil rights of US citizens.

This is a legal longshot. So the group is also building a grassroots movement that, much like in 2020 and 2022, is radicalizing a large group of people across the country to become election vigilantes. Their job is to swamp local election officials with false claims in an effort to derail current election policies in various states.

Finally, we turn to that bastion of democracy, Texas. The Texas Tribune reports that:

“Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.

Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and “publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the US government disclose “all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.”

How is it that these Republicans are taken seriously as politicians in a state as diverse as Texas? Apparently, they don’t trust their ability to keep winning statewide elections, even if it’s hard to see when (or if) Texas may become a purple or blue state.

Trump has shown America that there really aren’t any political constraints. Add to that the removal by the Supremes of several of the real constraints we did enjoy. What’s left is that state political parties can do just about anything to keep themselves in power.

Texas shows that. State electoral colleges? Sure. Gerrymandering where you can lose 57-43 and still win? Sure. Make voting a pain in the ass for voters you don’t want to see vote? Sure.

With the rules as they are, there is little recourse. But if Dems say “Court Reform” every time they’re in front of a camera, in a few years, the message might start to gain adherents.

Memorial Weekend Musings

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Paines Creek, Brewster, Cape Cod, MA – May 2024 photo by Bob Amaral Photography

Wrongo and Ms. Right just returned from a whirlwind visit to family in Western MA and from there to family on Cape Cod, MA. We then moved on to the Havanese National Dog Show in North Kingston, RI. Now, we’re happy to be back at the Mansion of Wrong, where most of our flowering plants are in bloom or are budding.

Happy Saturday, and welcome to Memorial Day Weekend, when we remember those in the military who died in service to the country. Before 1971, it was called Decoration Day, which was first observed on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. Back then, it was our most solemn holiday.

Memorial Day is Monday, when we mourn the soldiers we knew, and we briefly remember those we never knew personally. By now, the standard American public’s response is, “thank you for your service”. Saying it has become a reflex, like “bless you” when someone sneezes. Our default position is to thank, but not to think. For most of us, America’s foreign wars are a kind of elevator music. Always present, but we barely notice them.

So maybe we watch our town’s parade. There’s likely to be a cookout. It isn’t about love of country. It’s about sad Facebook emojis, Memorial Day mattress sales, and burgers on Monday

Let’s take a moment to think about the wars we are currently waging in Ukraine and Israel. Alex Vershinin, a retired US Army Lt. Col, has an article at RUSI “The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine” about the costs of war and how countries fight them in different ways, which can create great difficulty for the combatants: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“The US (and Israel) are set up to conduct high intensity, airpower heavy conflicts. Russia has long preferred attrition and that is the battle plan adopted by [Hamas]…Attritional wars require simple to operate weaponry since the odds [are] that both sides will have their experienced and well-trained forces badly thinned, forcing them to rely more and more on not-well-trained recent inductees. And of course being able to produce armaments in huge volumes is also important. The Western dismissiveness towards this strategy, seeing it as primitive, is setting it up for a fall.”

Satyajit Das, a former banker takes a similar view: (brackets by Wrongo)

“War requires massive amounts of equipment, munitions and manpower…..Western powers are currently struggling to match Russia and China in producing armaments for its client states [Ukraine and Israel]. The US and its allies have [not prioritized]…heavy manufacturing essential for weaponry in favor of consumer goods and services.”

This is econospeak for saying that the US and Europe are unable to keep the weapons supply chain full for the two wars they currently support. More:

“In contrast, their opponents have prioritized military manufacturing and maintaining inventories for armed conflict. Western industrial ecosystems, frequently now privatized,…lack the necessary capacity and surge capability.

It has always been true that sophisticated weapons systems can be countered by low-cost and low-tech improvisation. We’re seeing this in Ukraine with the use of cheap drones and missiles that can alter the battlefield situation.

That stands in contrast to America’s ‘boys-with-toys’ syndrome that places its faith in expensive high tech weapons, such as the F35 jets that cost around $150 million. Or Patriot Air Defense Systems that cost over $1 billion, with each interceptor missile costing a further $6-10 million. Individual artillery rounds can cost upwards of $3-5,000.

Given the Russian strategy of attrition, degrading Ukraine’s ability to finance its military action is an essential tactic. Russia’s targeting of industrial and agricultural infrastructure combined with the displacement of manpower has reduced Ukrainian output by about 35%. The cost of rebuilding what has been lost in power plants and other infrastructure is thought to be around $500 billion. Soon, Ukraine will need to restructure the country’s $20 billion international debt to avoid default.

Israel’s obliteration of impoverished, aid-reliant Gaza is economically pointless, unless the goal is to drive Gaza residents away. How and when Gaza gets rebuilt is unknown, but certainly it will take decades. OTOH, Israel’s economy has shrunk by as much as 20%. The call-up of reservists for military service and flight of talent out of the country has disrupted its industries. The conflict has cost Israel around $50 billion (10% of GDP) while increasing Israel’s debt. Its credit rating has been downgraded.

Neither of these wars can go on indefinitely. Ukraine and Israel are reliant on their Western backers who will soon be less able to support them financially or in their demand for more weapons. And in both cases the enemy is conducting wars of attrition. Those type of wars last longer and they test both a warring country’s industrial capacity and its borrowing capacity. From Vershinin:

“Unfortunately, many in the West have a very cavalier attitude that future conflicts will be short and decisive. This is not true….Even middling global powers have both the geography and the population and industrial resources needed to conduct…attritional wars.”

If the West is serious about a possible great power conflict, say between the US and China, or between NATO and Russia, the West needs to look critically at its industrial capacity, mobilization doctrines and their ability to conduct a protracted war.

Today, most US war games take place over a single month of conflict. As Afghanistan and Iraq have taught us, that isn’t a likely outcome. The attritional strategy is counterintuitive to most US military officers. Western military thought views being on offense as the means of achieving the decisive strategic goal: forcing the enemy to come to the negotiating table on unfavorable terms.

But they should know better. All of their recent combat experience acquired in overseas operations says when we’re fighting a war of attrition, we lose.

Anyway, it’s Saturday and time for our Saturday Soother. Here is some beautiful (and meditative) music for your Saturday. The Adagio in G Minor is attributed to Tomaso Albinoni, but actually was composed by 20th-century musicologist and Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto, purportedly based on the discovery of a manuscript fragment by Albinoni. Albinoni died in 1751, and Giazotto obtained a copyright for the Adagio in 1958.

A Unifying National Narrative

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Paines Creek, Brewster, Cape Cod, MA – May 2024 photo by Bob Amaral Photography

Wrongo has just started reading Erik Larson’s “The Demon of Unrest”, a history of how Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC fits into the overall story of the Civil War. It has a certain currency, since Wrongo and Ms. Right took a Charleston harbor tour in April that prominently featured Fort Sumter.

Usually, Wrongo would wait until he’s finished it to talk about a book, but today is an exception. In Larson’s note to readers (pg. XI) he starts by saying:

“I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place.”

That is the only time Larson refers to Jan. 6. The book mostly covers the five+ months from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861. We see that during those five months, amid the building talk of secession, a pro-slavery mob attempted to stop Congress from tallying the vote to elect Lincoln.

Knowing about that should hit very close to home for Americans today.

While there’s nothing explicitly in the book about Jan. 6, the Trump years (down to today) is a kind of spectral presence, not least when Larson describes the urgent concerns of public officials that the electoral count to certify Lincoln’s election would be disrupted, or that the certifications would be stolen or destroyed, and the Capitol attacked by angry Americans.

Sound familiar? The basic question today is similar to the question in 1861: “Can America stay together?” After the Civil War, we never thought that we would have to ask that question again. Today we can add a question about whether a presidential election loser should suffer consequences if they launched a coup attempt to retain presidential power.

It seems clear at this point that to bind the country together, we need to rediscover and commit to a new national narrative, a reaffirmation of America’s Cause.

All of this came to mind when Wrongo looked at a survey completed in April by the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. The Nationhood Lab is working to develop a new narrative of America’s purpose that can be broadly shared.

They asked registered voters what in the nature of the US they most identified with by offering statement pairs about our national purpose, American identity, and the meaning of our past. In each case, one statement was keyed off the ideals in the Declaration of Independence (Civic Ideals) while the other was rooted in characteristics like ancestry, heritage, character, and values (Heritage and Traditions).

Each was presented in a manner that made them sound as attractive as possible. The participants were then asked to choose between civic ideals and our traditional heritage/character. Interestingly, the civic statements proved far more attractive regardless of gender, age, race, education or region, except for Republicans and those who voted for Trump in 2020:

Sixty-three percent of Americans preferred the statement that we are united “not by a shared religion or ancestry or history, but by our shared commitment to a set of American founding ideals: that we all have inherent and equal rights to live, to not be tyrannized, and to pursue happiness as we each understand it”
The alternative, that we are united “by shared history, traditions, and values and by our fortitude and character as Americans, a people who value hard work, individual responsibility, and national loyalty”, was embraced by only 33% of respondents.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they agreed more with a statement that Americans “are duty-bound to defend one another’s inherent rights” over one that said we “are duty-bound to defend our culture, interests, and way of life” which was preferred by 36% of the survey participants.
Fifty-four percent preferred the statement “Freedom, justice, and equality are ideals each generation must fight for” and that “we must pledge ourselves to make our Union more perfect.” While the alternate statement, “Security, individual liberties, and respect for our founding values are the heritage each generation must fight for” was chosen by 40% of those surveyed.

Below is a chart with the full demographic results of the survey:

These results are in some ways, an antidote to the terrible polling Biden is experiencing. Nothing in the NYT poll should cause panic. While the NYT headline is that Trump leads in 5 states, that’s not actually what their own data says. Trump leads in 3 (AZ, GA, NV) and 3 are essentially tied.

But it’s very hard to believe that a significant share of people in the Nationhood Lab polls that share an overwhelming belief in civic ideals will turn around and vote for Trump in six months.

If you want additional support for the concept that current political polling can’t be relied on, consider the just-concluded Maryland Democratic Senate primary. David Trone, a businessman who put $62 million of his own money into his primary campaign lost to Angela Alsobrooks, Prince George’s County Executive. From Charlotte Clymer:

“There were ten polls on the Maryland US Senate Democratic Primary released this year. David Trone led in seven of them, most by double digits. Angela Alsobrooks led in three, never by more than five points. Alsobrooks just beat Trone by double digits.”

Political polling is massively overrated even if there is some marginal utility to it. If you really want results, you have to get out and vote.

Remembering The 1960s

The Daily Escape:

Corona Arch trail, UT – photo by Mark Shutt

Over the past few days, Wrongo and Ms. Right have taken a temporary deep dive back into the 1960s, the Vietnam War, activism and the folk music that accompanied those times. We did this by reading “The Women” a novel by Kristen Hannah, and watching a documentary “I Am A Noise” a truly stunning biopic about Joan Baez.

The scope of both go beyond the 1960s into the 1980s for “The Women” and up to the present for the Baez film, but the Sixties decade is the foundation for the book and the film.

Let’s talk about the book. “The Women” is about the early days of the Vietnam War, and is the story of an Army nurse, Frances McGrath (Frankie). She goes from being a newbie to a highly skilled surgical nurse on the frontlines of the Vietnam War only to return to a changed America that does not welcome home its veterans. Worse, the US government, including the VA, will not recognize that women were even in Vietnam, despite the fact that around 6,000 of them served in-country. How Frankie adapts to a world in which she feels totally out of place is the plot of the novel.

The book also charts Frankie’s PTSD, and estrangement from her upper class family after the war. It is filled with references to the music of the time, and if you are of that generation, all of the tunes will be familiar. While the historical fiction aspects of the novel are engaging, all of the characters are very thinly sketched. Frankie’s several romances propel the narrative, with all of them ending badly, contributing to her spiral into drug and alcohol dependence. It’s not giving too much away to say that she finds a healthy place in society, after many difficult years.

Wrongo has read much of the great literature that came out of the Vietnam War, including O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried“, as well as the extraordinary non-fiction Herr’s “Dispatches“; Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” and Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest“.

“The Women” isn’t up to the standard of any of those books, but it took Wrongo and Ms. Right back to revisit the changes that the Vietnam War brought to America in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Joan Baez film is essentially two stories, first about her being dead-center of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and the second, a starkly frank and difficult look at her life-long struggle with the crippling anxiety attacks she suffered beginning in her teenage years. At one point in the film, she says:

“I’m not very good with one-on-one relationships, I’m good with one-on-two-thousand relationships,”

Her mental health struggles are handled with sensitivity and finesse, although there’s a big reveal near the end.

In the 1950s, Baez was a college dropout singing barefoot in coffeehouses around Boston. She was invited to perform at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and was “discovered”. That led to her meteoric rise to fame. She sang at Carnegie Hall before she was 18 and was on the cover of Time magazine at 21. Baez says in the film:

“For whatever reason…..I think I was the right voice at the right time.”

Baez’s crystal-clear soprano was unforgettable. Wrongo started listening to her in 1963. Her pure young soprano on the first few albums still give him chills. And her activism placed her at the center of several political movements. She sparked a resurgence of American folk music, sang at both the 1963 March on Washington and at Woodstock. She helped raise Bob Dylan to prominence. She was on the fields with Cesar Chavez. And MLK Jr. visited her after she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War.

Baez remained interesting if not relevant down through the decades, until today. In the early 1980s, she dated Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In 2015, Taylor Swift invited Baez to dance on stage with her at a concert. Baez also visited Ukraine with the Ukraine Children’s Action Project, helping raise awareness for the war’s youngest victims.

The film’s big reveal comes about 90 minutes in, when Baez gets therapy and begins to grapple with childhood trauma. Periods of seeming contentment would be followed by breakdowns. After she endured a decade-long addiction to quaaludes, Baez tried to prise out “the kernel” of her interior darkness. It turns out that in therapy, Joan and her younger sister Mimi both believed that they were abused by their father as young children.

Baez thinks that was the cause of her difficulties with intimacy and her long periods of anxiety and depression. Clearly the film shows Baez and her two sisters as having been damaged early in life and then trying to cope with it for the rest of their lives. Ultimately Baez is shown having successfully navigated the past six decades, if not always easily, with her talent, perseverance and courage. See it yourself.

Enough for this week, it’s time for our Saturday Soother where we try to sluff off the tiny particles of outrage that cling to us from another week of political and geopolitical trauma. Here on the Fields of Wrong, the hummingbirds and the bluebirds are back. But this week, we’ve gotten very few things on our to-do list crossed off.

To help you prepare for another week of RFK Jr.’s brain worms and Trump’s trial, grab a seat outdoors in the shade and listen to a few tunes that come from the 1960s. First, the Vietnam anthem “We Gotta Get Outta This Place” by Eric Burdon and the Animals:

There are films that show hundreds of GIs in Vietnam singing this. Next, Joan Baez got her start as a folk singer. Here are two deep cuts from when she was very young. First, the traditional “Will you go laddie go?” Recorded in Edinburgh 1965:

Second, “With God on our side” also recorded in 1965, where she covers Bob Dylan:

This Bob Dylan song was written 1965…. and in 2024 we still don’t get it.

Americans Have No Idea How Deep Our Illiberal Roots Are

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Avon Beach, NC – May 2024 photo by Donna Cartwright Hayden

Discussions about “Illiberalism” are suddenly popping up in Wrongo’s daily feeds from many sources. Several are reviews of a book (“Illiberal America”) by Steven Hahn, an NYU professor of history.

Hahn also wrote an article in Saturday’s NYT that condenses the arguments in his book. In his column, “The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism”, Hahn argues that American illiberalism is not a mere reaction to a dominant tradition of freedom and individual rights, but a philosophy that has long competed against liberalism for primacy in American politics.

David Leonhardt in a NYT book review of Hahn’s book says:

“This country’s liberal tradition is certainly strong. It explains the democratic radicalism of the American Revolution, the relative openness of the US immigration system in the early 19th century and the inclusiveness of the nation’s public education system in the early 20th century.”

A short version of Hahn’s thesis is that the US has long been deeply reactionary and it’s amazing we’ve gotten as far as we have without a challenge to American democracy prior to Trump. Here’s a excerpt of Hahn’s view of our history:

“Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.”

America remains a self-deluded country since many Americans have no idea just how illiberal they are, or how deep those illiberal roots run. Today’s college students are living through the consequences of illiberalism. Educational institutions with DEI programs and cultural studies majors have no qualms about siccing the police on their students.

It’s no surprise that university administrators don’t observe the liberal tolerance they espouse in their curricula. But what’s less clear is American colleges and universities exist as training grounds for lawyers, physicians, future Wall Street geniuses and other legs in the stool of elitism. These students are supposed to be compliant because those professions require it.

Time to wake up America! In a few months we’re holding a presidential election in which an illiberal ethnonationalist will stoke white fear of replacement while his Party exploits anti-antisemitism to chip away at our tenuous liberal coalition. There’s danger, and we have little time left to get it right.

No matter how much violence a Trump loss unleashes it’ll pale in comparison to the violence that will come under a Trump dictatorship.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Van Halen’s “Ballot Or The Bullet” from their 1998 album “Van Halen III”. The song’s title comes from a 1964 speech by Malcolm X who, while speaking about the civil rights struggle, said “We’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet.”

Van Halen wasn’t a political band, but they appropriated Malcolm X’s speech for this tune:

Also, Eddie Van Halen played slide guitar on this, a rarity.

Sample Lyrics:

Give me liberty or give me death
No truer words have ever been said
Well are you prepared for your very last breath?
Don’t you dare start what you cannot finish
So when we face, face the adversary
No longer are we the minority

When a house is divided, it just will not stand
Once it’s decided, a line drawn in the sand

Ah, the ballot or the bullet
The choice is up to you
The ballot or the bullet
Tell me what you gonna do
The sword or the pen
Can’t be held by the same hand

Can We Make Billionaires Pay More Taxes?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Cundy’s Harbor, ME – May 2024 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Economist Gabriel Zucman is a proponent of a global wealth tax. His column in the NYT explains what that is and how it would work:

“Until recently, it was hard to know just how good the superrich are at avoiding taxes. Public statistics are…quiet about their contributions to government coffers….Over the past few years…scholars have published studies…attempting to fix that problem. While we still have data for only a handful of countries, we’ve found that the ultrawealthy consistently avoid paying their fair share in taxes.”

The problem of billionaires paying very little in taxes is international. In the US, the problem is that billionaires rarely have any salaries to speak of:

”Why do the world’s most fortunate people pay among the least in taxes, relative to the amount of money they make? The simple answer is that while most of us live off our salaries, tycoons like Jeff Bezos live off their wealth. In 2019, when…Bezos was still Amazon’s chief executive, he took home an annual salary of just $81,840. But he owns roughly 10% of the company, which made a profit of $30 billion in 2023.

If Amazon gave its profits back to shareholders as dividends, which are subject to income tax, Mr. Bezos would face a hefty tax bill. But Amazon does not pay dividends to its shareholders. Neither does Berkshire Hathaway or Tesla. Instead, the companies keep their profits and reinvest them, making their shareholders even wealthier.

Unless…Bezos, Warren Buffett or Elon Musk sell their stock, their taxable income is relatively minuscule. But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets. Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to borrow $13 billion to put toward his acquisition of Twitter.”

Slashing the corporate tax rate and getting rid of the estate tax have also had dire effects in terms of wealth distribution:

“Historically, the rich had to pay hefty taxes on corporate profits, the main source of their income. And the wealth they passed on to their heirs was subject to the estate tax. But both taxes have been gutted in recent decades.”

In 2018, under the Trump administration, the US cut its maximum corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%. And the estate tax has almost disappeared. Relative to the wealth of US households, it generates only a quarter of the tax revenues it raised in the 1970s.

The effective tax rate (the percentage of someone’s total income that they paid in taxes in all forms) is now lower for the 400 richest American billionaires than it is for the bottom 50% of income earners. Here’s the effective tax rate in 1960 and 2018 for these two groups respectively:

Source: NYT

The US national debt is $35 trillion, almost all of which we acquired during the same period as the reduction of taxes on the rich. That isn’t a coincidence. And since capital and people are both completely mobile, the problem of taxation of wealth doesn’t end at our borders. More from Zucman:

“There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15% on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.”

Zucman is proposing we apply a similar minimum tax to billionaires:

“Critics might say…this is a wealth tax, the constitutionality of which is debated in the US. In reality, the proposal stays firmly in the realm of income taxation. Billionaires who already pay the baseline amount of income tax would have no extra tax to pay. The goal is that only those who dial down their income to dodge the income tax would be affected.”

Critics of a minimum tax say it would be hard to apply because wealth is difficult to value. But according to Zucman’s research, about 60% of US billionaires’ wealth is in stocks of publicly traded companies. The rest is mostly ownership stakes in private businesses, which can be assigned a value by comparing them to the value of similar firms.

But the big issue is how to get broad international participation in this billionaire’s minimum tax. In the current multinational company minimum tax agreement, participating countries are allowed to overtax companies from nations that haven’t signed on. This incentivizes every country to join the agreement or lose tax revenue.

The same mechanism could be used for billionaires. For example, if Switzerland refuses to tax the superrich who live there, other countries could tax them on its behalf. Countries such as Brazil, have shown leadership on the issue, and France, Germany, South Africa and Spain have recently expressed support for a minimum tax on billionaires.

This is far from a done deal, although Biden has proposed a billionaire tax with similar objectives. And Zucman’s proposed tax wouldn’t impact the ordinary rich. He says there are about 3,000 people who would be required to give a relatively small bit of their profits back to governments.

Zucman’s closing words:

“The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea. What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else.”

Great idea, one that almost everyone agrees with, EXCEPT those who have the power to do something about it. We’re looking at you, Republicans! Also, when a significant percentage of the (relatively) poor in this country support Trump who is dedicated to cutting taxes for the rich, is there any hope that taxes will be raised on the wealthy?

That’s more than enough thinking for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we attempt to ignore the latest about the campus protests, or whatever else Gov. Kristi Noem is training her gun at, and gear up for another week in the political and cultural wars.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, the crab apple trees are in full bloom along with our weeping cherries. There is still plenty to do if we are to finish our spring cleanup before summer.

But, before we start down that backbreaking path, let’s grab a mug of coffee and a seat outside. Now watch and listen to Luigi Boccherini’s “Guitar Quintet No. 4 in D major “Fandango”, G.448”, recorded in the Unser Lieben Frauen Church, in Bremen Germany in 2019. Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist. He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over one hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos:

Should Dems Worry About Students Disrupting Their Convention?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Iron Duff, NC – April 2024 photo by Rhiannon Medford. Hard to believe those colors aren’t enhanced.

The clashes between Hamas/Israel war protesters and police on college campuses nationwide is spreading alarm among Senate Democrats. They’re worrying that this type of anger will make the Party’s Chicago-based presidential nominating convention a spectacle that will hurt Biden’s chances of re-election. Does that mean we’re looking at Chicago 1968 version 2.0?

From The Wrongologist:

“In 1968, Tom Hayden helped plan the antiwar protests in Chicago that targeted the Democratic National Convention. Police officers clashed with thousands of demonstrators, injuring hundreds in a televised spectacle that a national commission later called a police riot. Yet, Hayden and others were charged by federal officials with inciting riot and conspiracy.”

Those demonstration led to the Chicago Police riot. We remember it for Mayor Richard Daly saying these immortal words:

“Gentlemen, let’s get this straight. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

Those of us who have reached a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. From The Hill:

“A number of Democratic senators are old enough to remember the violent clashes between police and anti-Vietnam War protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the party’s presidential candidate was marred by images of police tear-gassing protesters and beating them with clubs.”

The Atlantic’s David Frum explains why the disruptions in Chicago in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. His point is that 2024 isn’t 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 will find the US government is much better prepared, Frum says: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This…was formalized in a directive signed by…Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel….Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.”

This wasn’t an issue in 2020 when the conventions were mostly virtual due to the Covid pandemic.

Right now, the media are making the campus demonstrations seem like a big deal, and they are, in the sense that university campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed. Frum adds:

“Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”

The Feds have also gone to school on the Jan. 6 insurrection that has informed their planning. While the subsequent J6 prosecutions make it much less likely that people hoping to disrupt the DNC convention will ever get much beyond being hopeful. It’s important to point out that the scale of today’s protests are nowhere near the same as the Vietnam protests in 1968.

More on the current thinking of students from Simon Rosenberg:

“…there is not broad support for these protests in America or on American college campuses. Most young people are far more concerned with making a living, their health after a pandemic, loss of reproductive freedom and our democracy, climate change, gun safety and a host of other issues.”

Rosenberg includes an interesting chart from the Harvard IOP Youth Poll:

The only issue where inflation did not win its individual match-up was when it was paired with women’s reproductive rights. Women’s reproductive rights was considered the more important issue, 57% to 43%. Israel/Palestine ranked next to last among the 16 issues.

Wrongo has no idea if the campus demonstrations will morph into something huge, or become a nothingburger, but he agrees with this from Caroline Orr Bueno:

“The stories you hear in the media will be the most extreme examples that can be found, and nearly all of them will be fundamentally misrepresented based on the biases of the person telling the story. This will fuel a cycle of escalation that few people on either side want.”

She makes the point that university administrators are not prepared to handle the demonstrations while at the same time, facing donor anger. From the London FT:

“Donors are withdrawing millions of dollars in planned funding to punish US universities for their responses to Hamas’s attack on Israel, in a stand-off over free speech, higher education funding and academic leaders’ public responsibilities.”

The FT also reports that:

“Such actions have highlighted the influence of donors, who last year contributed $60bn to US universities…”

Time to wake up, America! Let’s not get twisted up by the potential for demonstrations in Chicago by students protesting the Hamas/Israel war. How about focusing instead on the antidemocratic extremists who speak at the Republican convention to renominate Trump? We shouldn’t fear this debate. We should welcome it.

To help you wake up on a warm Tuesday, watch and listen to the late Peter Green, former guitarist of Fleetwood Mac, play “Albatross”, originally from FM’s 1969 album “The Pious Bird of Good Omen”. Here Green plays it with the Peter Green Splinter Group in England in 2003:

The late, great BB King said of Peter Green: “He’s the only white guy to ever make me sweat.”

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: History

Memorial Weekend Musings

Remembering The 1960s

Americans Have No Idea How Deep Our Illiberal Roots Are

Can We Make Billionaires Pay More Taxes?

Should Dems Worry About Students Disrupting Their Convention?