Is Democracy Stable?

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Empire of the United States

Mark this date, January 31, 2020. If the pundits are right, it will go down in history like the unknown date before the Ides of March, 44 B.C., when the ancient Roman Senate made Julius Caesar “dictator perpetuo.” It’s the date when the modern American Senate will have voted to prostrate itself before our modern American Emperor, Trump I. By the close of business today, we can all murmur shamefully to Ben Franklin, “Sorry, we lost the Republic you gave us. Our bad!” As in ancient Rome, losing our democracy has been a process, not a single event. Congress gave up its supposed constitutional power to declare war long ago. Trump’s recent credible threat to veto its feeble attempts to resurrect that power have given it the coup de grace. Now, in letting Trump dictate the result of his own trial by ordering key witnesses not to appear, our Senate will have emasculated Congress’ impeachment power. That was the last hope our Founders gave us of curbing a rogue president. So let’s take stock. Congress has given up its power to declare war. By the end of today, it will have abandoned its power of impeachment. Our Attorney General has opined, in effect, that the President’s power is limitless. All those in the Cabinet and in our investigatory and law-enforcement apparatus who sought to limit Trump’s power have been fired or have resigned. The Constitution says that any president is Commander in Chief of our armed forces, the most advanced and lethal, if not the largest, in the world. No one disputes that. So by the end of today, the man, not the Constitution, will have become the law. Trump will have neutered Congress. Our Constitution will have become a museum piece, a bit of paper with no special relevance to our day-to-day governance. Everyone from our own Attorney General, through the Cabinet that Trump appointed, to the Senate that was supposed to be the final bulwark of democracy will have recognized his overweening power, if not quite yet as literally absolute. A minority of ancient Roman Senators later assassinated Caesar, but that didn’t make a difference. The precedent had been set; the die had been cast. Rome decayed into empire just the same; it just took a while. The fate of the greatest democracy then in human history had been sealed by the whole Senate’s earlier having made Caesar dictator for life. Just so, the precedents made today, along with Trump’s threatened veto of the attempt to repeal the AUMF, will outlive Trump the man and every Senator who bows before him today. So lower your heads in subjection. Tell your kids in grave voice. The United States of America is no more. You are no longer citizens of a democracy but subjects of the Empire of the United States. Long live Emperor Trump I! And God help us for having such a man in charge of the nuclear codes, with no effective restraint.

Is democracy a stable form of government? Collectively, we humans are entering a critical phase in studying this question. You can call it “observation,” as in astronomy, or you can call it “experiment,” as in laboratory chemistry or physics. But one way or another, we are going to have some kind of answer, probably no later than the middle of our new century. For the United States, most of the answer may come by the end of this year, if not this week.

We already have a partial answer, based on observation of our species’ recorded history, at least in the West. Evey well-educated high-school graduate knows about ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

The ancient Greeks had direct democracies, in which all male citizens elected leaders of relatively small city-states. The ancient Romans refined that into a form of representative democracy, in which Roman senators represented the people of Rome at large. They gave the name “res publica” (“public thing” or “republic”) to their form of government, and our US Founders deliberately adopted it in our Constitution.

But every educated high-school graduate also knows what happened next. Larger empires, including Rome’s, absorbed the democratic ancient Greeks’ small city-states, and Roman democracy eventually decayed into an empire of its own. The Roman senators who were supposed to represent the people lapsed into representing their own debt-ridden commercial interests, and the top leaders intimidated and manipulated them and the Roman people to become absolute rulers.

The next millennium of human history came to be known as the “Dark Ages,” or, in our recent, more euphemistic era, the “Middle Ages.” According to official history, Rome “fell” when sacked by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 A.D. Human democracy did not get its next jump start until the Western “Enlightenment” began in the 1600s and 1700s, although it had precursors in Magna Carta in England as early as 1215.

In the half-millennial resurgence of democracy that has followed, the United States of America is neither the biggest democracy (India’s) nor the oldest (England’s). But, like ancient Rome, it’s certainly the most powerful and culturally influential. Now it appears to be decaying into empire, infected by much the same disease that doomed ancient Rome.

Unlike ancient Rome’s, America’s senators are not the direct proprietors of the commercial interests that would-be emperors manipulate and pander to. Instead, our Senators are their lackeys. But much the same process is occurring nevertheless.

The leading commercial interests, which today we call “oligarchs,” have co-opted the Senators and now dictate what they do, from lowering taxes and cutting “burdensome” regulations to fighting or supporting foreign wars to maintain American dominance of (or global influence over) oil. Clear majorities of the people want such things as universal health care and health insurance, family leave, wages sufficient to support a family, an infrastructure program that repairs potholed streets, collapsing bridges, poisonous water systems, and outmoded railways, while providing good, non-outsourceable jobs, and (increasingly) a real effort to slow climate change. Yet all these things take second or third priority, if they matter at all.

Donald J. Trump is just the current avatar of this trend, which started as early as Ronald Regan declaring selfishness the national moral norm with the slogan “It’s your money!” Appeals to selfishness always seem so right, until you begin to notice that they have undermined not just your society’s moral norms, but also your own livelihood and your form of government. Somehow, the oligarchs and the powerful always seem to be more skillful at being selfish than the average Joe or Mary, and Joe and Mary never seem to catch on.

Born about 100 B.C., Julius Caesar began ancient Rome’s slide from democracy into empire with his “bread and circuses.” Today we have much more subtle but more powerful organs of propaganda, including Fox and freelancers like Rush. We also have Russian and Chinese spooks and thousands, maybe millions, of Internet trolls, who all exploit Zuckerberg’s desire to remake society and make billions without regard to consequences.

When will we know how far this process has gone in our own age? Probably by this Friday. If our Senators vote to have no witnesses or documents in their “trial” of our impeached president, they will have signalled their complete subordination to our modern emperor, whom we anachronistically still call a “president.”

Like the rest of Congress and our courts, our Senate has no army, no police and no huge bureaucracy. It can help make laws, which this president can and does ignore, as he did in stealing money to build his Wall and holding up duly appropriated money for Ukraine’s defense against Russia. When that happens, the only real power the Senate has is to expose the president and encourage the people to understand and resist. If our Senate refuses to do that, and instead acquits our impeached president, it will, in effect, be licking his boots, just as the ancient Roman senators did Caesar’s.

Yes, a few senators conspired to kill Caesar, but the die was cast. The majority had forfeited their senate’s democratic power. That forfeiture allowed Rome to vacillate between a semblance of democracy and a real empire for a time, before it ultimately decayed into a durable empire and vanished from world history.

Is this the inevitable fate of our democracy? Are our individual senators and Donald Trump himself just pawns in the play of vast historical forces that derive, ultimately, from our evolutionary heritage as clans of apes each ruled by an alpha male?

The big picture seems to suggest affirmative answers. In the five-to-ten thousand years of our species’ recorded history, real democracies have been rare enough to garner special attention. But for a few ancient Greek city-states, ancient Rome, England and its progeny (the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), and the few other modern democracies that have arisen after the Age of Monarchy and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial wars, virtually all our species’ history has been variations on the themes of monarchy and empire. A recitation of the names of today’s supreme leaders suggests that that’s precisely where our entire species is now headed: Bolsonaro, the Castros, Duterte, Erdoğan, Kim, Maduro, Morawiecki, Orban, Putin, bin Salman, el-Sisi, Trump and Xi.

And yet, and yet . . . Communism was a complete artifact of human imagination, specifically Marx’, Engels’, Lenin’s and Stalin’s. In fair and enthusiastic trials in Russia and China, it didn’t last long: 74 years in Russia and about 29 years in China. In contrast, democracy’s near-millennial durability in ancient Rome, and again in modern England and its progeny, suggests that there’s something more to democracy than a made-up system. People seem to be happier and more productive under democracy, however much their evolutionary heritage and the deliberate manipulation of tyrants and oligarchs work against it.

But make no mistake about it. Human democracy, worldwide, is now undergoing a more difficult trial than ever under the Caesars in ancient Rome. Modern media have made possible manipulation from the top by confusion, distraction and delusion that even Julius Caesar’s bread and circuses could not match.

How do we know? The US Senate appears ready to relinquish its power to a man who has insulted, vilified, bullied, dominated and humiliated most of its members. Those members, who have every reason to hate him, and many of whom opposed him in the past, now appear eager to invite his boot to stomp upon their faces. If they send that invitation, American democracy will be finished; Trump’s acquittal will be mere bitter icing on a poisonous cake.

But don’t despair. Take the long view. Democracy died, beginning with Caesar, in ancient Rome, only to rise again from the rubble of the Age of Empire over a millennium later. There appears to be something in human nature—besides our evolutionary heritage of alpha-male leadership in small clans—that values equality and every individual’s worth, especially in a society of ever-increasing individual education and specialization.

Maybe that something will rise again, centuries or millennia in the future. Maybe, in the interim, our imperial species will somehow survive climate change and nuclear proliferation and their mutually reinforcing crises. We can all hope.

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America is Broken

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“Everything from who can vote, how they vote, who influences that vote, who is elected by that vote and who is accountable having been voted in, is broken.” — Charles M. Blow, NYT pundit, yesterday.

Pessimism is never in vogue in politics. Donald J. Trump may be the most horrendous leader in our own history plus the non-monarchical history of England and its democratic progeny. Yet he has the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and his deluded masses believe it.

Ronald Reagan began our moral and political degradation by teaching us, contrary to the credo of every organized religion, that it’s right and proper to be selfish and greedy. Yet he had to declare the beginning of his deeply immoral reign “morning in America.” It was morning, all right, the morning after Walpurgis Night.

The process of our moral and social dissolution that Reagan began is coming to its ghastly conclusion this very year, 2020. In theory, the impeachment process provides a chance to stop and perhaps reverse it. But its dismal conclusion is now inevitable: no witnesses or documents and therefore no real trial. The slogan “a government of laws, not men” will prove itself a lie, as Republicans whom Trump insulted, bullied and marginalized, most of whom have every reason to hate him, kiss his ring and line up like zombies to save him from removal from office.

Once that happens, there will be only one last chance to save American democracy from sliding over the cliff entirely: the coming presidential election. Trump’s re-election, which is entirely possible, could spell the end of our democracy. By the end of this very year, the United States could be confirmed as a corrupt, venal oligarchy brought low by entrenched minority rule, widespread disenfranchisement, violence, bullying, lies, fake news and propaganda, including foreign disinformation.

The irony of this year’s number, a metaphor for clear vision, requires us to see. Blow’s column yesterday, quoted above, is depressing but absolutely accurate. Yet even it doesn’t tell the whole story. It focuses on the voting process and the coming impeachment debacle, but there is more.

This week Congress will forfeit its power and its constitutional role. By letting the president determine whether and how he and his minions will testify before Congress, Congress will, in effect, confirm the president’s power to dominate two of our three branches of government. (The third he and Mitch have already suborned by stealing Garland’s appointment and securing Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s.)

This precedent will outlast Trump’s presidency, however long or short. Just like ancient Rome’s Senate, Congress will become a mere appendage to imperium.

It gets worse. The upcoming election, our Republic’s last chance for survival in any recognizable form, will be skewed. What will skew it is not just the massive disenfranchisement of which Blow writes. We also have rampant gerrymandering inherent in our Senate and our Electoral College, and more inherent in Republican partisanship at the state level, plus a Democratic primary season that exalts two of our least representative states and last bastions of aged white privilege, Iowa and New Hampshire.

But it gets still worse. In making this last point with his usual incisiveness and brevity, David Leonhardt reveals a startling fact. Sixty percent of our population lives in towns of 50,000 or fewer people.

Think about that. Like Iran, our bitterest enemy, we are actually a nation of peasants. Not only that: we magnify their influence with a skewed governmental structure intended from the outset to magnify the power of agrarian interests and to preserve the horrid institution of slavery.

Just as China is commiting its vast resources to science and technology, our people are turning away from science toward superstition and religion. They are willfully foregoing vaccination, preparing to fight a Christian jihad against Islam, rejecting and oppressing minorities and worthy immigrants, and dragging their feet hard against fighting global warming. If Iran were not so small and relatively powerless, it and we could be entering a senseless era of religious wars to match those within Catholic and Protestant Britain, which produced today’s Northern Ireland and the chief impediment to a clean Brexit.

The final horror is, ironically, a fruit of our own American science and technology. We invented the Internet and gave it to the world for free. It permits every single person on line—now about one-third of our entire species—to communicate with every other, individually and in groups. The theory of “many-to-many” communication has now become practice.

But what have we done with the vast potential that we created? Have we magnified the power and wisdom of men and women like our Founders, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Franklin? Have we amplified the voices of those who know the flaws inherent in our species and design clever institutions to circumvent them?

Not hardly. Instead, we have amplified the influence of every demagogue, crackpot, conspiracy theorist, foreign spook, fake newsman, religious extremist, business avatar of greed, and native propagandist. All of them have conspired, willy nilly, to make and keep Trump president.

We have marginalized the best and exalted the worst. In politics we have Trump and McConnell, Graham and Jordan. Business/capitalism is our primary religion, far surpassing Christianity in real adherents and influence. In it, we have Murdoch, the late Ailes, the now pathetic and grotesque Harvey Weinstein, plus the recently fired Muilenburg and the cleverly imperial Zuckerberg. We’ve excelled in science and technology but we have failed utterly in social management, basic human psychology, and moral philosophy.

So the American century is over. American democracy is finished.

So, most likely, is our entire species’ second great trial of democracy worldwide, after ancient Greece’s and Rome’s, which jointly had a near-millennial run. Without throwing away realism, it’s hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future without leaders like Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdoğan, Kim, Orban and lesser demagogues and authoritarians like Modi, Putin and Xi. After all, alpha-male clan leaders are our species’ evolutionary heritage.

The only remaining uncertainty is how precipitously the US will decline. Much depends on this coming fall’s election. Whatever its outcome, the Western Enlightenment is over. George Orwell’s dismal prediction has come to pass. He missed only China’s meteoric rise.

So our species’ future now lies in China’s hands. That may be humiliating to the “West,” which for at least four centuries thought it had all the answers. But there are three reasons for hope.

First, modern China never wanted, and still is trying to dodge, the role of global leader. As with individuals, the best leading ones are usually those, like our own George Washington, who try to duck the mantle and accept it only reluctantly.

Second, China’s “Communist Party” is a complete misnomer. With Xi’s self-accession as leader for life, China has reverted to its ancient empire in all but name. The so-called “Communist Party”—80 million strong—is but a successor to China’s ancient Mandarin class. It’s much bigger, much better educated, and infinitely more technocratic than the old one. Besides Germany, today’s China may well be the nation most deeply committed to science and technology as solutions to mankind’s intractable problems, including global warming.

Finally, the Chinese people are intensely practical. That trait probably derives from China’s inefficient written language, which makes abstract thought difficult and delays the age of maturation and education toward complete fluency in writing.

But whatever the reason, the Chinese are not prone to bouts of fevered pursuit of verbal abstractions, let alone religious wars. They threw off Communism in a less than thirty years, as distinguished from Russia’s near seventy. Since World War II they have fought only two external wars, by proxy, against us in Vietnam and Korea, and then only for the practical purpose of protecting their homeland with compliant border-buffer states.

The Chinese as a group have never had a religion as muscular or proselytizing as Christianity or Islam. Their oldest and most widespread religion—Confucianism—is little more than veneration of elders and ancestors and respect for authority. In a world where any teenager, dangerous demagogue, religious fanatic or mere nutcase can create and promulgate fake news with startling verisimilitude, that may not be a bad thing.

Some day, the West may come to understand how the toxic combination of the ungoverned Internet and our First Amendment has brought America down. But it’s far too late for slow understanding to arrest our rapid, nearly complete decline.

So we’ve got to learn to respect and work with China, not fear it. Just think of the effective quarantine of Wuhan and the surrounding cities, some 20 million people. With a coronavirus that appears capable of spreading during its incubation period, that quarantine is an absolute practical necessary. But could you imagine it happening in Chicago, let alone all of Illinois? What we should fear is cults that duck vaccination and nations that eschew science and believe God is on their side, not China.

Erratum: An earlier version of this post referred to the movie magnate and accused serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein as “Epstein.” I regret the error.

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How to Pick a Dem

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In talking with fellow Democrats, I’ve noticed something disappointing. Some pretty sophisticated people take a surprisingly unsophisticated approach to picking a candidate for president. They focus on one or two aspects of a person’s policy or personality and judge him or her on it. If they like the one or two aspects, they might vote for her or him. If not, out he or she goes, without a further look. And what the media obsessed about most recently gets magnified wholly out of perspective.

You know what I mean. Sanders is too dogged and insistent, and he just dissed Biden unfairly. Warren is too schoolmarmish, and she groused about Bernie allegedly belittling a woman’s chance to win. Both are too “far left,” even though polls show a majority of the electorate wants most of what they’re selling. Buttegieg is too young and inexperienced, and anyway no one who’s openly gay can be elected president. Biden is too old and makes too many gaffes.

In the last two days, I’ve talked to three highly intelligent people who can’t stand Sanders pointing his fingers during debates—a frequent gesture on his part. All three sincerely believe he can’t ever win, in large measure because of that.

Now you might think like that about somebody that you met for the first time at a dinner party and never expect to see again. But you certainly wouldn’t do that with a prospective spouse. Let’s have a show of hands: how many readers were at first put off by the person they eventually married, and are now deeply in love? And you certainly wouldn’t do that with a co-worker, with whom—though no fault of either or you—you have to cooperate to achieve something, if only to keep your job.

So is there a better way to evaluate candidates for our supreme leader?

The Washington Post has taken a crack at it. After receiving answers from the leading Democratic candidates to an 85-question survey, it boiled their answers down to twenty issues about which voters seem to care most.

The resulting questionnaire is available on line. It’s binary (yes-no) on some issues but nuanced on others. For example, it asks whether government health insurance (Medicare or Medicaid) should “should cover everyone,” “should be an option for everyone,” or “should not be available to everyone.” It asks whether the government should “expand,” “pause the expansion of,” or “phase out” nuclear power.

You can take the questionnaire in about five minutes and find out which of the leading Democratic candidates best fits your preferred policy profile. I did, and the results were sobering. My enthusiasm for Warren had been flagging due to her insistance on “Medicare for All,” on which I just changed my mind, and her tiff with Sanders. But in all she matched my policy preferences on fourteen out of twenty issues, leading the rest of the pack by at least four.

What really surprised me was the next tranche. Based on my impressionistic view of the nation’s needs, I had been considering only Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg, in that order. But on the questionnaire for me, Yang came next, with ten policy matches. Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Sanders and Steyer were all tied for third place, with nine each. Who would’a thunk it? Yang and the two billionaires were right up there with the pols, and Yang, with less money and zero political experience, ahead of all but Warren.

Of course experience matters. Of those five second- and third-place finishers, Steyer and Yang have absolutely no political experience, and Bloomberg and Buggigieg have none above the city level. Only Warren and Sanders have national political experience.

Age matters, too. I know because I’m 74. I’m not bad at self-evaluation, and I can tell you that my stamina, once steel-trap memory, and even my cognition are not what they used to be—even a few years ago. Even if I had political talent and the bottomless stamina and patience needed to say the same thing over and over again, I would no more think of running for president (or even mayor) at my age than I would of trying out for a spot on a professional football team.

So how do I put this all together? I want to see all the figures on a table or spreadsheet and meld them somehow. Here’s how that spreadsheet looks for me, with the candidates ranked according to the number (out of 20) of matches to my preferred policies on the Washington Post’s questionnaire, plus their local and national experience, age and wealth:

Leading Dems’ Matching of My Policy Preferences, Plus Experience, Age and Wealth
Candidate	Policy Matches of 20 on WaPo Quiz	Years of Local Exp.	Years of Nat’l Exp.*	Age*	Billionaire?
Warren	14	0	8	71	No
Yang	10	0	0	46	No
Bloomberg	9	11	0	79	Yes
Buttigieg	9	8	0	39	No
Sanders	9	10	30	79	No
Steyer	9	0	0	63	Yes
Klobuchar	7	8	12	60	No
Biden	6	2	44	78	No

* As of inauguration, if elected president

While my own results on the Washington Post policy questionnaire were surprising in several respects, in the end they confirmed my general judgment. Warren matched my policy preferences 40% better than the next-best match, Yang, who has no political experience.

While I hesitate to tar him with the comparison, that puts Yang in the same experience class with Trump. And Trump, in my view, suffers not only from being half-crazy and unfit for any political office, but also from failing to understand how hard it is to run a nation of 328 million people, as compared to running a business with fewer than 500 employees.

Of the four tied for third place in my questionnaire, only Sanders and Buttigieg meet my general criteria. I don’t think Bloomberg or Steyer, as self-made billionaires, could cope with the inertia and divisiveness of our age, especially after having spent most of their careers running businesses in which they could hire and fire underlings at will. That’s not how government works, with its three separate branches. Steyer has no experience in political office at all, and Bloomberg would be tied for Sanders as the oldest on inauguration, but without Sanders’ long political experience at both local and national levels. Age and strategic flexibility are not common companions.

Biden would be only one year younger, and he doesn’t speak English especially well. More to the point, in matching only 6 out of twenty of my preferred policy choices, he’s simply not progressive enough for me. The nation has lost ground steadily on progress, empathy and social cohesiveness since Ronald Reagan taught us all to be selfish. I want our next president to reverse course and maybe even help us catch up with the better developed nations.

So while I would vote for any Democrat against Trump, I don’t see Biden providing a big advantage in the seven key Electoral-College states, except perhaps in Pennsylvania. If I were to choose based entirely on “electability” in those states, I would pick Klobuchar, who’s younger and slightly more progressive and (best of all) embodies the female virtue of empathy which, after four years of Trump, we all desperately need.

Of course this analysis will vary from voter to voter, along with how they fill out the questionnaire. But I hope that most Dems will start with the Washington Post’s questionnaire on their own personal policy preferences, and then fold in age and experience as I did. Only by doing something like this can voters make a complete, semi-quantitative analysis, which this critical election demands.

As for being a billionaire, I don’t see it as an advantage in the White house. Perhaps billionaires achieve that status by being smarter than the rest of us. But our capitalist system tends to reward impatience, overweening ambition and crushing others, including by sexual and economic predation. Our politics doesn’t, or at least it shouldn’t.

Bloomberg has been doing some good with his billions by running hard-hitting media ads showing Trump as the fraud, liar and in inhuman monster that he is. While Bloomberg’s ads tout his own candidacy, they are in many respects similar to ads that would run in the general election campaign.

So Bloomberg is bringing the fight to Trump early, and he has the money to crush Trump in this manner. What Steyer is doing his own billions, besides stroking his own ego, is unclear to me. Perhaps he just needs better media and political consultants. Both men, I think, could do more to invest in organizations like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action and the independent Black Voters Matter, which improve our democracy by helping more citizens vote.

At the end of the day, I don’t think the electorate is ready for a billionaire president, let alone in the seven critical Electoral-College states. Trump is president because too many people in those states didn’t want billionaires buying and controlling pols, and they hoped to fight fire with fire. Good luck with that!

Endnote: A Warren/Abrams Ticket? I remain convinced that any Dem could improve her or his chances of surviving the circular firing squad by giving the public some idea of his or her team as president before the general election. That would mean naming a running mate and key Cabinet members, or at least providing short lists, during the primary campaign.

It now seems clear, for various reasons, that Sanders probably won’t be on any of Warren’s short lists, and maybe vice versa. So Warren should consider naming Stacey Abrams as a possible running mate and doing so early.

Abrams would make a superb running mate. She is super-bright and a superior communicator, able to express complex ideas in simple language, just like Warren. Abrams graduated from Yale Law School—perhaps the nation’s most selective—and so has a similar legal academic background. She could meet Warren on the same intellectual ground. (In contrast, Sanders has no post-graduate education.)

But all this would be just the beginning of Abrams’ advantages. She has the executive experience that Warren lacks. Abrams has worked in the youth services department of the office of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, has earned a master’s degree in public affairs, and has served as a tax attorney working with non-profit clients and a founder and/or senior executive in a financial services firm, a company that makes beverages for infants and toddlers, a legal consulting firm, and now Fair Fight Action, the voter-empowerment organization.

The word in Democratic circles is that Abrams is a no-nonsense, intensely practical executive who has advanced the mission of every organization in which she has worked, or which she helped lead. But that’s still not all. As Warren’s running mate, Abrams could cancel or reverse African-Americans’ supposed preference for Joe Biden. She would augment, if not entrench, Warren’s advantage with the biggest so-called voting “bloc” in our nation: females. And best of all, she would not be distracted by any other public office, even her leadership of Fair Fight Action—which she could delegate and which in any event would enhance her and Warren’s campaign.

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The Case for Medicare for All

For a note on today’s MLK Day holiday, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

They say that a “conservative” on law and order is a liberal who’s been mugged. But that bromide cuts both ways. A progressive—even a radical—on health insurance is a “moderate” whom our private, for-profit system has mugged.

I know, because it happened to me, quite recently. This is my story.

For ten years, I’ve been under the care of a superb physician and human being. He’s an immigrant from Egypt, a Christian who left Egypt early in his life.

This surgeon’s skill has already saved me twice, once from cancer and, later in life, from health assaults on my lifestyle. At every turn he acted as a skilled professional with a warm, caring and empathetic manner.

This doctor was and is an embodiment of the Hippocratic Oath. After I retired, I regularly sought his care at the Cleveland Clinic, traveling to see him from as far away as Berkeley, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In December I discovered that I had failed to make a recommended follow-up appointment with him. I called the Cleveland Clinic, only to find that he had left its practice. The Clinic would not tell me where he had gone or why, only that he had left.

So with no help or thanks to his former employer, I set out to track down my surgical savior on the Internet. With the aid of Google Translate, I pursued him to conferences in Arabic in the Middle East. My heart sank at the thought he might have gone too far away for me to travel. Yet after an hour of searching, I found him in another warm climate: Phoenix, Arizona. That’s just a seven-hour drive from my home in Santa Fe. So I rejoiced.

But that was when the real trouble began. My surgeon had signed on with a private organization called Valleywise Health Medical Center but had not yet begun his practice there. For two weeks, both before and after he started work, I could not contact him, his group, or any medical professional (even a nurse!) who works with him. No one could tell me when or whether I could see him for a routine diagnostic procedure.

After five or six telephone calls, one fax, and three e-mail messages, I knew no more about my surgeon’s nascent practice at Valleywise than I had from reading the brief Internet announcement of his coming. All my telephone inquiries and written messages disappeared into a black hole.

This response would have been unacceptable if I had been trying to communicate with my dry cleaner over a lost pair of pants. But my health and potentially my life were at stake.

Incensed, I demanded to speak with the “lead” of the patient “communication” team at Valleywise. She told me that my surgeon could not see patients until the business-insurance contractors who controlled the practice had “approved” him. “Was he licensed to practice medicine in Arizona?” I asked. Yes, she said, but the business/profit/insurance people were still calling the shots. Apparently they had their own criteria.

In desperation, I asked whether I could pay for the procedure myself. After all, it’s just a twenty-minute, noninvasive, outpatient procedure requiring only local anesthetic. “No,” the lead “communicator” replied. The insurance wouldn’t pay until the business people had approved my surgeon in his new position, and their rules prevented a patient from paying for anything covered by insurance. This was so, she said, even through my insurance (Medicare and United Health Care), to my knowledge, have no in-network requirement and claim to cover any licensed provider.

So I needed a simple, routine procedure from a superb doctor just beginning his practice with a new medical group. The insurers wouldn’t yet pay him to treat me, and I couldn’t pay him myself. He simply couldn’t treat me at all until his business and private-insurance overlords gave the go-ahead. That “Catch 22” was one that even Joseph Heller’s famous novel couldn’t have imagined. But this wasn’t satyric fiction; it was and is dismal fact.

The “communicator” on the phone couldn’t say how long the bosses’ approval would take, but her experience suggested at least ninety days. That’s too long to wait for a possible diagnosis of recurrent cancer. So I would have to find another, unfamiliar caregiver, on an emergency basis.

Typically, doctors have at least ten years of higher education and training: four years of college, four years of medical school, and one year each of internship and residency. For specialists like mine, there’s also another year or two of speciality training. Yet people who, like our president, spent a mere four years in undergraduate study of “business” are now telling them not only what to do, but how to do it.

Another surgeon at a major medical institution told me that his business bosses went so far as to “prescribe” a mandatory minimum number of biopsies in another routine diagnostic procedure, regardless of what the physician performing it found or didn’t find. Far from the Hippocratic Oath, whose basic tenet is “Do no harm,” these business bosses demanded unnecessary, invasive steps, with risks of infection and bleeding, for no apparent reason but theoretical risk aversion to protect profits.

If you want a dysfunctional health-care system, be sure to have business-school grads and lawyers, not doctors, run it, telling superbly trained doctors what do do. That’s what turning American medicine into a for-profit business has accomplished.

So yes, this system has mugged me personally. I have to look for another physician to do my simple procedure on an emergency basis. I have to break my bond, at least temporarily, with a superb doctor who has cared for me for a decade. Not once in my entire weeks-long interaction with Valleywise was I allowed to communicate with anyone trained in medicine or health care—not so much as a nurse or hospital orderly. Insofar as letting me deal with practitioners of medicine—real caregivers—Valleywise was a stone wall. And all because we have a health-insurance system that has thrown away the Hippocratic Oath and replaced it with private profit.

My objections to Medicare for All on this blog (see this post and this one) were never based on the substance of health insurance or health care, but on political realism alone. I thought that the coercive effect of wiping out private insurance by law would be a hard political sell. I was right about the coercive aspect of “Obamacare’s” mandate: from the outset it was the principal focus of right-wing demagoguery. Now the courts have killed the mandate. Right-wing litigators are also asking them to do away with the rest of Obamacare, which got over twenty million new patients insured.

Now, having been mugged personally, I’m ready to roll the dice. I’m eager to probe how many others our broken system has mugged like me. I want to see the Hippocratic Oath replace profit as the focus of medicine. I want altruism and caring to become medicine’s moral engines again.

The whole basis of private health insurance is a lie. There is no “market” in health care: you do not “bargain” over sickness, pain, suffering and death. Likewise there is no “market” in health insurance, because low premiums depend on insuring everyone. The rest of the developed world has single national payers for that very reason.

So now I’m looking forward to watching Bernie Sanders and/or Elizabeth Warren handle our absurdly dysfunctional and grotesquely inhumane system of private health insurance. I want to see them burn it to the ground, and I hope to live to dance upon its ashes.

[For a broader take on Medicare for All by humorist John Oliver, click here.]

Endnote: A Word to Doctors

My favorite uncle, long deceased, was a skilled general surgeon. His career was in the United States Navy, where he served in World War II and the Korean War. He and his wife are buried in adjacent graves in Arlington National Cemetery.

Until he retired with the rank of captain, he worked for military pay, under Navy discipline and Navy orders. He never thought of medicine as a business. He joined the Navy not just to serve our country in a time of peril, but to avoid wasting his talent, training and energy doing anything unrelated to medical science or patient care.

When Medicare was first under discussion, my uncle thundered against it as “socialized medicine.” I never understood why he fell so hard for the bosses’ propaganda, but he did. Maybe it was pride in the struggle it took to get to his position. He also thundered mightily against medical interns being paid, unlike those of his generation, starting some time in the late 60s.

Today’s doctors ought to know better. Those whom I’ve known as a patient are far more under the thumbs of business people and insurers than my uncle ever was under the thumbs of superior naval officers. I never heard him complain about superiors second-guessing his medical decisions. But I’ve heard several doctors in elite medical groups complain that their business and insurance overlords treat them as hired hands. And then there are those arbitrary boss-made rules, like a mandatory minimum number of biopsies in a routine diagnostic procedure.

So today doctors have a choice. They can go for the gold and put their careers, their medical groups and their professional discretion into the hands of profit-hungry business people who can get the gold for them—after skimming most of it for themselves. Or doctors can do what Jesus did, throw the money changers out of the temple, and recover their professional dignity, their control over the practice of medicine, and their self-respect. They can’t do both.

There’s no question in which direction today’s private health-insurance system points. It treats doctors as hired hands who must do what the business people and private insurers tell them. It suffocates them with wildly dysfunctional bureaucracies and mutually incompatible computer systems. And it claims, with some justification, that doctors need those dysfunctional bureaucracies and mutually incompatible computer systems to handle all the claims of the many private, for-profit insurers who handle and pay their bills.

As a patient, I know what kind of doctor I prefer. I want the one who puts his or her practice of medicine, professional discretion, and self-respect first. Today, that means accepting a single payer, probably the government, that minimizes its intrusion into medical decisions because it’s a single, coherent organization that doesn’t work for profit but just wants medical care to work.

To be honest, such a system probably also means lower average pay for the medical profession in general. But what patient wants a doctor who works for money, rather than for patient care and the advancement of medical knowledge? And won’t the medical profession be better off with fewer doctors motivated primarily by their pay?

How many students go to medical school for money anyway? Maybe if the government subsidized more of the high cost of their medical training, fewer graduating students would be motivated by high pay just to retire their staggering student debt.

MLK Day 2020

I didn’t want to let this holiday go by without acknowledging the man whom it honors. But the honor is as bittersweet this year as it was last year, perhaps more so. We have endured another year of “leadership” by a man utterly unfit to serve in our government at the highest level, let alone to lead it.

More to the point, the likelihood of Trump being acquitted of the clearest case of treason ever asserted against an American president makes MLK’s absence today all the more poignant. For as the pundit Colbert King pointed out in a recent tribute, MLK was a rare thing in our pragmatic, commercially obsessed United States. He was a moral leader, first for Christians and then for all of us.

We have few or no moral leaders today. Our chief executive is purely transactional. He self-evidently has no moral code or moral compass besides his own personal and financial aggrandizement. Yet no Democrat running to replace him seems to fill that void. Dr. King was practically unique in our history in advocating for equality, justice and freedom as moral values, not just political and practical ones. He was literally unique in advocating their achievement exclusively by nonviolent means.

MLK was shot down by a cold-blooded killer in an act of hate and right-wing extremism. But he was not the only one. So were JFK, who helped save our species from nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and RFK, who had created a task force to rid our nation of organized crime. These three assassinations, all in the 1960s, likely were the historical fulcra of our dystopia and misery today.

Of the three men assassinated, King was the only one who preached a different and better morality. We have no one like him in public life today. Instead, the so-called “evangelical Christians” support a man as far afield from the teachings of Jesus as Donald Trump.

As we come close to destroying our planet out of greed for easy energy, and as we get no farther away from the nuclear self-incineration that we nearly suffered in 1962, we desperately need a moral leader like MLK today. Unfortunately, we have no one who even comes close to matching him, so his memory is all the more poignant this year.

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Warren’s Waterloo?

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Is Elizabeth Warren getting desperate as Bernie Sanders appears to be slowly pulling ahead? It certainly appears so. At least her errors of judgment in campaigning seem to be growing in number. So far, I see at least three. The latest came in last night’s debate.

Warren and Sanders are the only candidates offering medicine strong enough to cure our national ills. So I consider Warren’s latest unforced error to be the debate’s headline. But I’d like to reprise all three.

Warren’s first unforced error was her response to Trump’s dismissing her claim to partial Native American heritage with the pejorative nickname “Pocahontas.” Warren took the taunt deadly seriously, to the point of having a DNA test. The test showed an Indian ancestor between five and ten generations ago, with a best guess at eight. That means Indian ancestry at the level of one divided by two to the eighth power, or less than 0.4%.

So what? Native Americans are a tiny minority of us, estimated at less than 2.7% Is identifying with them going to advance Warren’s campaign? Probably not.

Native Americans who live on reservations and/or are formally registered as tribal members tend not to think much of those who claim the same heritage but don’t and aren’t. Making such a big deal of “proving” her claim of heritage was an error of judgment whose only redeeming feature was that it occurred early enough in Warren’s campaign to be easily forgotten.

Warren’s second error of judgment was much more serious. It was trying to “differentiate” her brand of “Medicare for All” from Bernie’s by imposing a three-year delay in wiping out private insurance by fiat.

Whom does that ploy fool? It doesn’t avoid the coercive obliteration of the private insurance industry or insurance that many citizens have and like. In the end, it achieves little more than “Medicare for All Who Want It” but speeding up the transition, at most by a few years, on pain of rampant coercion. It’s also an implied lie—that the change avoids the biggest political liability, namely, that very coercion.

And so we come to Warren’s latest error of judgment: accusing Bernie of telling Warren, in private with no witnesses, that a woman can’t be elected president. Forget the fact that Bernie is very careful with sweeping statements. He limits himself to the painfully obvious, such as the fact that the US has become an oligarchy rigged against working people. That’s the very same painful truth on which Warren also bases her campaign.

But Bernie has a much more powerful rebuttal than that. Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote in 2016 by two million (Bernie erroneously said three). Shift the distribution of that vote a little more favorably in the Electoral College, and she would be president. Is Bernie too dumb and/or ill-informed to know that?

But Warren’s charge was more serious than just making little sense on its own merits. Together with the Pocahontas DNA test, it may be part of a pattern: a campaign based on identity politics. Is Warren going to go toe-to-toe with Trump in that arena?

The right way to run as a woman is the way Warren did in the last debate. It’s to show impressive empathy for all the many people whom our oligarchic economy has left behind. The wrong way is to run petulantly, as disadvantaged, slighted and belittled.

Warren ought to know as much, having had the benefit of a sterling example. Barack Obama won the presidency fair and square, twice, by clear popular majorities, never mentioning his race except for one brilliantly incisive speech on racism in Philadelphia. Obama showed by action, not words, that grievance doesn’t win elections; understanding and rising above grievance does.

Warren’s latest unforced error was bad enough by itself. But apparently she compounded it by refusing to shake Sanders’ hand after the debate. No one was close enough to overhear their words, but the televised body language was suggestive, if not unmistakable.

I keep hoping that these errors of judgment are the fault of campaign staff who need to be fired. But Warren’s public stiffing of Bernie’s outstretched hand was apparently direct, spontaneous and personal. For voters desperately hoping for her and Sanders to join forces at some stage and together right our ship of state, it was a kick in the solar plexus.

Meanwhile, Bernie continues to advance in the polls. He had a brief but superb interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS recently. Far more important, he had a lengthy, in-depth interview with the New York Times’ editorial board. There he demonstrated an absolutely essential quality for any chief executive: knowing what he doesn’t know.

Yes, Bernie is old and not getting any younger. That’s precisely why he needs a brilliant, younger but like-minded pol like Warren as his running mate, to carry on if the worst should happen. Yes, Bernie sometimes exaggerates numbers, as in calling Hillary’s two million national-vote surplus three. But every time the Times asked Bernie something he wasn’t sure of, he said so. He went on to say he would consult the experts and decide.

Not only is that answer reminiscent of Pope Francis’ supremely attractive humility. It’s the only right answer for any chief executive. No one knows or has thought through everything, so the worst answer is to fake it, or, worse yet, think you actually do have an answer for everything. Isn’t that precisely why Donald Trump is such an abysmal leader?

So if Warren is losing ground to Sanders, it’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because she lacks the humility and/or experience to know when to be adamant, when to be flexible, and when to step back.

It may be because there are people on Warren’s staff who desperately need firing. If so, that’s a test of her executive leadership, which will repeat itself many times if she wins the presidency.

I haven’t yet canceled my monthly contributions to Warren’s campaign. I hope her downward trend will reverse, and I believe it can if female empathy replaces female grievance.

But time is getting short. Our nation desperately needs both of the two doctors who’ve best diagnosed our ills, male and female, somehow to make common cause and join forces, lest the oligarchs and their paid lackeys overwhelm us all.

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It’s the Team, Stupid!

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” traces to James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political svengali. Following it led Bill to two terms in the White House.

But that was then. This is now.

Today the economy is chugging along well, despite all the nonsense and showmanship Trump can throw at it. The traditional measures of the economy’s performance are at all-time highs: employment, GDP, and the stock markets. So if the Dems run on the economy, they are likely to lose the presidency yet again. Very few of Trump’s die-hard followers are likely to budge, unless they lose their jobs.

That could happen, but it’s not likely. Our economy is so big, diverse and resilient that it takes years for changes in economic policy to make a noticeable difference. That’s why Trump can take credit for the years-long recovery from the Crash of 2008 that President Obama and his team so carefully managed.

Eventually, Trump’s mindless trade wars and insistence on obsolete energy technologies will have their inevitable effects. But expecting those effects to show up before next November is a losing gamble. More likely, Trump will make a nothing deal with China, declare victory, and retain most or all of his base. His base might even grow, giving Trump “credit” for cleaning up the disastrous trade mess that he himself created.

No, “It’s the economy, stupid!” won’t work in 2020, except possibly for Trump. The Dems need to focus instead on what’s most wrong with Trump as president. He’s a one-man show, as close to an emperor as we have ever had. He doesn’t listen, except to the worst of our media. He doesn’t consult. With a single Tweet, he wipes out careful consultative processes among experts, developed over generations within American government. And he’s entrenching his ability to rule single-handedly by replacing the experts, one by one, with his sycophants and lackeys. If he wins a second term, that process will accelerate, vastly increasing the risk of a catastrophic, unrecoverable blunder, like an all-out war with Iran.

To win in 2020, the Dems need to do two things. First, they have to unite all the many, many people whom our “roaring” economy has left behind. To do that, they have to have a simple and coherent set of policies. They must stop confusing the public by fighting over details and nuances. They ought to be able to state their policies completely in a minute-long explanation or a 45-second rebuttal.

Second, and maybe most important, the Dems have to show the people that, in 2021, they’re going to give them their government back. The Dems must convince the public that democracy matters, that an excellent bureaucracy that gets things done for people matters, and that a huge military-industrial complex that doesn’t shoot from the hip matters. And they’re going to have to show the public, by the way they conduct themselves during the primary campaign, that they and only they can bring those essential things back, through teamwork.

So the motto for this primary campaign and the general-election campaign next summer ought to be simple: “It’s the team, stupid!”

This goes especially for Sanders and Warren. Both have much the same policies. They differ only in detail, at a level that passes over most voters’ heads. The few wobbly Republicans they might attract over the din of so-called “mainstream” media screaming “Socialism!” will hardly notice the difference. But their arguing about who said what about a woman reaching the White House will almost certainly turn most or all of those wobbling voters off.

There’s an essential numerical truth that our media and pundits, as far as I can tell, have utterly missed. In every poll of which I’m aware—nationally, in Iowa and otherwise—the sum of numbers for Sanders and Warren exceeds the sum for Biden, usually by a margin far above the polling error.

What does this mean? It means that a plurality of likely voters wants real change, not a “nice guy” who’s going to walk into the phalanx of Trump, Mitch, Fox and the oligarchs with outstretched hands trying to make friends. And they want real change in about the same numbers of Democrats (40%) as voters generally who took a gamble on Trump and now are sticking with him.

So Sanders’ and Warren’s task in the debate tonight and henceforth is difficult but clear. They must differentiate themselves peacefully and subtly while presenting a united front against the abomination of Trump’s mad imperial leadership. They must unwind the circular firing squad now.

Over the past two centuries or so, a handful of nations have captured the human imagination as leaders. In addition to our own, they include Britain, France, Germany, Japan and (more recently) the rising star China.

What point of distinction do they all have in common? Large, extended bureaucracies, full of well-trained experts in virtually everything: education, medicine, scientific research, toxic chemicals, the environment, commerce, trade, housing and outer space. These bureaucracies are where the rubber of human science, technology and “big data” meets the road of civilization.

We Americans used to have the best bureaucracy of the lot. Maybe we still do. But Trump has done his damnedest, as systematically as his scatterbrain permits, to undermine, destroy and degrade it. He’s attacked it with corruption in both senses of the word: mercenary venality and simple rot. He’s fired a lot of good people, and a lot more are leaving because they can’t stand to see their hard work—at pay far less than they could command in the private sector—being systematically undermined or reversed by political superiors with no relevant education, training or experience.

Failure to build a good team infects not just our bureaucracy, but the highest levels of our government. Consider the disastrous reign of George W. (“Dubya”) Bush, our first president to use demeaning nicknames as a tool of social dominance. He appointed forgotten and obscure Republican functionaries named Cheney and Rumsfeld as Vice President and Secretary of Defense, respectively. They brought us the War in Iraq, and on false pretenses! We are still fighting it seventeen years later, and the nation we supposedly fought it to help now may simply kick us out, after all our collective sacrifice in blood and treasure.

Like Trump, Dubya also demonstrated a classic flaw of insecure, incompetent leaders: appointing obscure people with no independent constituencies to high places, apparently to insure their absolute loyalty. Among Dubya’s examples were Alberto Gonzales, who served a little over 2.5 years as Attorney General before resigning under multiple scandals, and Harriet Miers, whom Dubya nominated to the Supreme Court but who failed to achieve confirmation.

Dubya and the Republicans are hardly alone in this regard. (Out of respect for the honorable dead, I won’t dwell on the late John McCain picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.) As beneficent a figure as Jimmy Carter today once had his Bert Lance. Hillary Clinton had her Huma Abedin and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and God knows what other nobodies waiting in the wings to populate her cabinet. Few even considered what might had happened had she picked Bernie Sanders as her running mate, instead of the unknown and anodyne Tim Kaine. She might well be president today, with Sanders and/or Warren helping keep our finance rogues from blowing up our economy yet again.

No, the time is long past when American voters ought to expect winning presidential candidates to drag their obscure high-school friends, personal cronies and big campaign donors into the White House with them. We Americans have a right to expect them to build a good team, from known public figures with long track records, and to explain how they would do so before getting our votes.

Every president ought to have a couple of deeply trusted people in the White House with her or him. Often those people will be friends from the long past, unknown to the public. Obama had his innocuous Valerie Jarrett, for example. FDR had his Harry Hopkins, who served officially as Secretary of Commerce but in fact anchored and supervised FDR’s “brain trust.”

But politics is a profession, like any other. In fact, it’s one of the most difficult and demanding of all professions. It takes practice and experience. That’s why Abraham Lincoln assembled a famous “Team of Rivals” immediately after winning the most divisive election in our history. Among them were the very men who had hotly contested the election that Lincoln had just won.

That’s what we Americans desperately need this year, as I had hoped for in 2007. There may be reasons for candidates refusing to name names. But most of those reasons boil down to political-operative claptrap and sheer superstition. Anyway, the best way to attract voters disappointed that their favorite candidate didn’t win the nomination is to pick that candidate as veep or a member of the Cabinet, or at least to put her or him on a short list.

If our government is to start an optional war that lasts for seventeen years and counting, as in Iraq, or to bail out the bankers who caused a financial disaster, as in 2008, the public has a right to know the people who actually conceive and order those actions—not just the top dog who acquiesces in their ultimately wildly unpopular plans. Ideally, the public ought to be able to consider the character and track records of the masterminds in electing the top dog. In a healthy democracy the men or women who actually conceive those plans ought to have more public visibility than Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Hank Paulson had, respectively. They ought to be known quantities when the votes are cast.

After three years of the disaster that is Donald Trump, there’s enough for a dozen presidents to do. We have to restore a semblance of independence to our Fed, our Department of Justice, our FBI, our Department of State and our CIA. Ditto the EPA and OSHA. We have to get our finance sector under control again. We have to force industry to cut pollution before our national average longevity starts diving for reasons other than opioids. We have to start prosecuting and jailing home-grown domestic terrorists, and executing the worst of them. We have to get all of our people health insurance. We have to make our military, while still under ultimate civilian control, independent and future oriented. We have to end our endless wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and decide rationally whether we really want a new war with Iran. We have to restore the funding and direction of our scientific research and chart a course toward carbon-free energy independence. We have to do something about the terrible economic inequality and corruption in our society. And we have to give all the people who work mostly with their hands good jobs and hope for their families’ futures.

Just as no one person can pilot a commercial airplane, design and program a Website, perform a heart or hip transplant, and lead a platoon in war, no single person can do all that needs to be done, even with all the power of the presidency. Our next president will need the ablest help available, including assistance of the very rivals who just recently finished fighting her or him for the nomination. And we, the public, need to know who they are or will be in advance.

As our once-superb government degenerates into a caricature of the late Roman Empire, we desperately need a White House and a Cabinet staffed by strong women and men with illustrious careers, independent constituencies and independent sources of power. The last thing we need is more obscure people picked for no other reason than long acquaintance with or loyalty to our supreme leader.

We’ve seen quite enough of that, thank you. We are now watching the consequences devour the very substance of our nation. And with every day in which every man and woman in government is judged on loyalty alone, the chance of making America great again sinks further into the mud.

Endnote: What Teamwork Might Look Like

Teamwork could be subtle. Or it could be as open and dramatic as Trump’s habitual showmanship.

Here’s a scenario that might blast the 2020 election wide open: Tonight, at the debates, Warren announces that she is ending her campaign for the presidency and throwing her support to Sanders. Sanders pledges to pick Warren as his running mate if he wins the nomination. The two together name a full Cabinet, including other current candidates, of course if they accept.

The public gets a “dream team” dedicated to virtually the same policies of real change, plus the campaign juggernaut of combined staff. Sanders gets a huge advantage with female voters. Public worry about his age and health disappears: if anything happens to him, Warren will become president. If Sanders’ health deteriorates under the pressure of the Oval Office, Warren can run for president in 2024 with his blessing and support.

If they win, the public gets a team dedicated to real change with specific policies, plus the more experienced of the two candidates in the top job. Warren gets a “boss” who she knows will respect her and give her a real portfolio, if only because he’ll have far too much on his own plate. The Dems’ primary race suddenly becomes a clear choice between “moderation” and real change, with real change the leader and both of the strongest horses pulling the wagon.

Fantastic, you say? Impossible? Well, how impossible did Trump’s presidency look four years ago? Wouldn’t this “impossibility” augur a bit better? All it would take is teamwork.

[Note: I suggest the combination in this order only because of the difference in age and experience. Warren is still my preferred candidate, but I would be absolutely ecstatic if she increased the chance of real change winning—and of enjoying an eight year run—in this way.]

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Accurate Weapons III

For an endnote on why a weapon’s “accuracy” depends on how it’s used, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

In a series of posts on this blog, I’ve argued that the accurate weapons recently produced by modern science and technology can advance the causes of human civilization and species survival. (Read, in the following order, this, this, and this post.)

The argument proceeds in three steps. First, accurate weapons can impose personal and individual responsibility, to an extent never before possible, upon butchers, the authors of genocides, and leaders of nations who start “optional” wars of aggression. They can even stop or prevent international wars of aggression, as they appear to be doing right now in Ukraine.

Second, trying to impose collective responsibility for butchery simply doesn’t work. Punishing all of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany after it started and lost the First World War ultimately produced Germany’s Nazi psychosis and the Second World War, with its fifty million premature deaths. Collective punishment was not a good solution. It was also one against which our then president Woodrow Wilson argued mightily, but in vain.

After the Second World War, the again victorious allies took a different tack. In the Nuremberg Trials, they imposed personal and individual responsibility on the authors of the unprecedented international aggression and the Holocaust. Far from imposing collective responsibility on the aggressor nations, as after the First World War, the US authored the Marshall Plan. That marvelous reconstruction project converted the devastated aggressors Germany and Japan into the model nations they are today, not to mention humanity’s third and fourth largest economies. Individual punishment and collective empathy turned out to be a much better solution.

The third step in the argument is to define “accurate” weapons. Simply put, they are weapons that don’t just hit their intended targets, but also kill the bad guys without causing much, if any, “collateral damage.” In other words, they impose the ultimate physical accountability, death, on the individuals most responsible for butchery, genocide or wanton aggression, without harming much of anyone or anything else.

Nuclear weapons are “accurate” in this sense only if they are never used. Starting an endless war against against a foreign and mostly misunderstood culture, even to get rid of a vile dictator like Saddam, is most definitely not using accurate weapons. Today’s most accurate weapons are things like snipers, ninjas, poison, pinpoint and bunker-busting missiles, shoulder-fired anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and (most recently) killer drones.

The final step in the argument is to compare the (so-far rare) use of accurate weapons with humanity’s steady progression toward “Total War” during the last century. Hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent civilians perished in such events as the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention thousands of smaller acts of massive state aggression in the midst of a global war. The dismal record of impossibly disproportionate violence against civilians continued in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and continues today in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

The reductio ad absurdum of inaccurate weapons came during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the entire civilian populations of the United States and the Soviet Union—and possibly all of humanity—risked extinction or catastrophic maiming in order to “punish” the rival authors of the Cold War. Slowly, over decades, that brush with self-extinction motivated our species to reconsider the absurd notion of “total war” and develop more accurate and less cataclysmic weapons.

This brings us up the most recent example of the use of accurate weapons: last Friday’s assassination of the Iranian killer General Qasem Suleimani and his Iraqi conspirator and counterpart. The weapon used, a killer drone, was “accurate” in the sense that those it killed were, as far as is now known, only the targeted bad guys and their immediate aides and adjutants. There appears to have been no “collateral damage” at all, except a couple of vehicles.

I know, I know. This most recent use of accurate weapons couldn’t have come at a worse time and couldn’t have been ordered by a worse commander in chief. It could lead to a war that no one wants.

On both sides, the senseless “Little Cold War” between the United States and Iran bears more resemblance to a grudge match between Mafia capos than a rational act of policy on the part of modern nation-states. (I’ve outlined the analysis in this post and this one and won’t repeat it here.) And our own leader, who reportedly surprised his underlings by ordering the strike, is an erratic, impulsive, irrational, scatterbrained, irascible, profane and bigoted old coot, who gets his ideas from watching the showmen and purveyors of pure right-wing propaganda on Fox. As an expert commentator described persuasively, the process by which he made the decision to strike bore absolutely no resemblance to the cautious, deliberate, rational exploration of causes and probable effects of which our government and military are capable.

And yet, and yet . . . The deed is done. Its consequences, both immediate and long term, are still unknown. Could some of them at least be positive?

No one questions Suleimani’s role in multiple minor wars and lethal attacks around the Middle East. He was a clever and effective minor butcher, not on the scale of Saddam or Assad, but nevertheless a mass murderer. He appears to have played a key role in the ongoing butchery of Yemen, for which Iran’s higher leaders, MBS and the Saudi Princes bear joint responsibility. (The Trump Administration’s claim that Suleimani had been planning more immediately imminent butchery seems a transparent excuse based on thin evidence, but his past butchery was real.)

Much is made of the fact that Suleimani’s successor, Ismail Qaani, is already on the job. But the precedent is set. Could it be that the knowledge of how Suleimani died, and the sense that Qaani could suffer the same fate at any time unless he lives his life underground, will moderate his behavior? There is nothing like personal and individual jeopardy, the same as the proverbial hangman’s noose, to focus one’s moral thinking. That’s the value of accurate weapons.

Of course the strike on Suleimani was a violation of international law and an act of war. But should it be?

Leaders of nations enjoy a long and hallowed tradition of legal immunity from attack in times of peace. But that tradition is based on little more than practical reciprocity. If we kill their leaders for every little disagreement, they’ll kill ours, too, and being a leader at all will become much more dangerous for everyone.

But does the threat of reciprocal killing justify legal immunity in even the most extreme cases? We are not talking here about mere differences in policy, or the practical and economic spats that occur regularly among nations. We are talking about mass murder, albeit on a relatively minor scale.

Suleimani’s crimes also have earmarks of attempted genocide. They appear motivated by the Shiite-Sunni divide, the Persian-Arab divide, and the fierce enmity between Iran and the House of Saud that resembles nothing so much as a family feud between medieval dukedoms.

We are not even talking about things like China’s mass incarceration of a million Uighurs. Though incarcerated, mistreated, brainwashed, and even forcibly sterilized, the Uighurs are still very much alive. They can be released and reunited with their families at any time. The crimes against them can be softened and atoned for, maybe even mitigated.

Murder cannot. It is final. There’s no statute of limitations on the crime of murder precisely because it’s final. In that sense it’s a unique crime. It’s even more horrific and irremediable when it involves multitudes and has overtones of genocide.

Even Kim Jong Un, the world’s most pathological tyrant today, has so far killed relatively few people deliberately. His catastrophic social and economic policies have caused millions of his own people to starve to death. Many have died in his labor camps. His regular provocations against South Korea have killed a few soldiers and innocent fishermen. But that’s not the same as deliberately slaughtering masses of innocent civilians like Assad (with barrel bombs and poison gas) or Saddam (with poison gas at Homs). Very likely, Kim’s knowledge that we have, or soon will have, small submarine-launchable nukes, against which Kim has no defense, and which could kill him in any bunker with minimal collateral damage to his people and his nation’s infrastructure, is one of many things deterring him from more murderous provocations.

So the question raised by Suleimani’s killing is a stark one. Are we humans all better off in a world where perpetrators of mass murder are vulnerable to sudden death from the skies, and that sort of personal “accountability” may restrain their mayhem or ultimately terminate it? Can mass murder be reduced by putting the lives of mass murderers in jeopardy with accurate weapons? Answering those questions will require a lot of thought by world leaders, the world’s military strategists, and legal minds. Suleimani’s assassination merely opens the discussion, which modern accurate weapons have rendered pertinent by making it much easier and less risky to kill mass killers without causing collateral damage.

Endnote: What’s an “accurate” weapon? As the recent downing of a civilian airliner near Tehran proves, “accuracy” in the sense of this post is not an intrinsic property of any weapon. It depends upon context. In particular, it depends upon the discipline, restraint and professionalism of the troops or spooks who use it.

If, as now appears likely, a precision ground-to-air missile downed the Ukrainian civilian airliner because the Iranians mistook it for an American warplane, it was most definitely not an “accurate” weapon in that use. Even mourners at a high-profile funeral can become inaccurate weapons when they trample each other to death.

Large nukes, for example, are generally highly inaccurate weapons except when never exploded, i.e., used only for deterrence. But small ones engineered to produce a minimum of radioactive fallout with very short half-lives could be “accurate” if used to take out a tyrant like Kim while moving his nation dangerously close to unprovoked nuclear aggression. In that case the “accuracy” would arise from a combination of the weapon’s intrinsic engineering and its use.

Even poison gas or barrel bombs—the weapons of mass murder preferred by the late Saddam and Assad—could be “accurate” if used to take out barracks-full of known terrorists. And of course a weapon is inaccurate if its targets are randomly selected civilians guilty of nothing, as was common in aerial bombing in World War II and as is usual in terrorism today. In the 9/11 attacks, the terrorists turned something as innocuous as civilian airliners into grossly inaccurate weapons of mass murder.

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The Power of Spectacle and Campaign Strategy

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No one seems to have said the last word on what makes Trump Trump. But every informed American and all of our mainstream media know he’s something unique in American history.

We’ve had executive demagogues like Huey Long and and George Wallace, but only at the state level, and only in the South. We’ve had menacing national public figures like Father Charles Coughlin and Senator Joe (not Gene!) McCarthy. But none of them had ever made it anywhere near the White House, until now. (With spooky foreshadowing, the Demagogue McCarthy came from Wisconsin, one of Trump’s linchpin states.)

So what got Trump into the White House? What keeps him there? What makes him tick? More to the point, what makes about 40% of us accept his depravity, meanness and scattered brain as normal and civilized, let alone in a supreme leader? What makes his followers see him as their savior? And what, if anything, is the antidote?

There are analogues in human history. But to appreciate them fully, you have to go back a ways and keep an open mind.

The analogue that fits best is Julius Caesar. He was born in 100 BC, when Rome was a thriving democracy. By the time a minority of Roman senators assassinated him in 44 BC, Roman democracy was all but finished.

Like a guttering flame that takes time to die, Rome’s democracy made brief resurgences. But in the nearly five centuries remaining until the “Eternal City” was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 A.D., Rome was mostly an empire. Julius Caesar, one man alone, had given Rome’s democracy the coup de grace. Before a minority killed him, Rome’s senators had made him dictator perpetuo, or “dictator in perpetuity.”

But how did he do it? What was his secret?

History has a way of sharpening focus. Over two millennia the details have vanished, known only to scholar-specialists, if at all. But a single phrase still remains to describe what history best recalls: “bread and circuses.”

We all know what “bread” means. People were hungry in Rome because its great empire had over-extended itself. The senators and Roman elite (who were often one and the same) had arrogated wealth and civil power to themselves. Ordinary people had nowhere to turn but toward a demagogue who claimed to be their champion. Sound familiar?

Neglecting the so-called “lower classes” can be dangerous to a society’s health. The starkest modern proof of this point came over eighteen centuries later, in the French Revolution. The oligarchy literally lost its heads.

There is nothing the least surprising about this basic fact of human nature, except how easy it is to forget. Yet what people today forget even more often is the second word in the phase: “circuses.”

Two millennia later, in today’s Rome, the great Coliseum stands partially restored, a magnificent ruin. Guides will tell you that its arena was filled with sand to absorb all the blood and gore, with voids and catacombs underneath to make cleaning by flooding easier.

The Roman “circuses” were nothing like our recently discontinued Barnum & Bailey’s. They were supremely violent. Individual gladiators fought others to the death. There were mock “wars” with hundreds of participants, real weapons, real blood, and real killing. Sometimes there was fire, sometimes water in mock naval battles. There were starved wild beasts ripping each other apart, and occasionally devouring condemned human criminals. (The throwing of Christians to the lions came long after Caesar: Jesus Christ hadn’t yet been born.)

Imagine yourself a Roman commoner at one of those spectacles. You can’t keep your family fed, and each day brings a new source of worry. But for a couple of hours, the circus distracts you and makes you feel transcendent.

You sense the presence of your fellow citizens, sitting around you far from the Emperor’s box on high. Those close to you are much like you, oppressed, poor, helpless and worried. You sense their presence, their likeness. You smell their sweat and sense their pheromones of fear, anger and despair.

But once the blood begins to flow, you feel something rare for your social class—a sense of power. You hear the crowd’s roar and the rhythmic stamping of its thousands of feet. For all your powerlessness in everyday life, at least you’re not like those buggers being slaughtered on the bloody sand down below. And when the Dictator Perpetuo, who bought you all this distraction and feeling of transcendence, sounds his brief call to rise and follow him, won’t you do just that?

Two millennia later, we’re just a bit more civilized. We don’t kill people or even animals for sport or spectacle. But when you think about it, aren’t Trump’s MAGA-hat rallies just a more modern, less bloody, version of Caesar’s circuses? Don’t the calls to “Lock her up!” or to bang suspected criminals’ heads create the same transient sense of power and vindication in the downtrodden? Don’t they offer them the very same sense of fleeting dominance, magnified by the size, sound and smell of the crowd?

There’s something uniquely powerful, uniquely human, about an angry mob—the smell of sweat, the mutual sense of pheromones, the crowd’s roar and shared laughter, and the stamping of tens of thousands of feet. What Trump has harnessed and brought forward to the twenty-first century is the same power of spectacle that drove Caesar to the pinnacle of ancient Roman power and Rome itself from democracy to empire.

Lest you think this idle speculation, fast-forward your historical memory twenty centuries to the late 1930s and the fields of Nuremberg, Germany. Listen, in your mind’s ear, to the rants of Adolf Hitler and the responsive cheers of tens of thousands of angry young men, all shouting in unison “Sieg Heil!” (“Hail Victory!”).

Hear Hitler blame foreigners and the Jews for all of your and Germany’s troubles. Then listen to the crowd’s thunderous answer: a call to vengeance and to war.

This is not speculation. It’s recent reality. It’s just as real as the fifty million graves made by the war that Hitler started. Only a tiny fraction of those graves lies in the fields of Normandy, in seemingly endless rows, which our surviving troops and pols visit and remember every June.

Equally real are the infamous rallies of our own native Ku Klux Klan, with their white robes (for anonymity), burning crosses, and the pogroms and lynchings that often followed their rallies. Those ultimately lethal rallies, too, occurred in just the last century.

The truth of our new century and its horrible beginning is that our democracies and global civilization are suffering a two-pronged attack. The first and most discussed is a creature of novelty: the propaganda, disinformation and fake news made possible by the Internet and modern social media.

But the second attack—a much older one—is equally important. It’s the open secret of Caesar and Hitler: summoning the power of the crowd and the mob with huge rallies in the flesh.

Demagogues as diverse as Trump, Hungary’s Orban, Israel’s Netanyahu, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro have rediscovered this power. So has Narendra Modi, in his more subtle but similar series of mass rallies partly aimed at Hindu supremacy. So has Fox, which duplicates (as much as possible) the power of the mob by electronic means, faking “news” over TV screens with stand-up comics posing as pundits and offering the audience entertainment masquerading as news, which amplifies the crowd’s basest prejudices.

Yes, social media are dangerous. Yes, it’s a tough world today, in which anyone, anywhere can make things up out of whole cloth and incite demonstrations, division, and even violence from a continent away.

But it’s also dangerous for pols to forget that voters are flesh and blood. There’s some “magical” power in a crowd, let alone a mob, that no electronic device can feign or duplicate. To think otherwise is to confuse the attraction of a bright and shiny iPhone screen—a mere toy—with the power that has driven human civilizations to downfall and destruction for two millennia, most recently in the memory of some still living.

The lesson is simple. Spectacles matter. Crowds matter. Personal appearances matter. And because our nation is so large and diverse, so does stamina on the part of aspirants to supreme leadership. Demagogues like Trump, Caesar and Hitler are driven by the fires of ambition and ego; those who lack that fire must have real stamina. And those who forget these lessons of history beg to repeat the still-tragic loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016, not to mention the downfall of Rome.

The necessary stamina need not be superhuman if a campaign is smart. All that’s required is a campaign focused relentlessly on the 80/20 Rule, and on Trump’s rediscovery that policy and politics sell best if diluted, with entertaining mass rallies.

Unfortunately, modern mainstream media are still living in the past, when TV had three consistent national channels and Walter Cronkite was “the news.” The venerable British weekly The Economist, for example, lauded Joe Biden early last month for “continu[ing] to lead the Democratic primary field in national polls.”

This is deeply flawed thinking. National polls are not going to predict the presidential race in 2020 any more than they did in 2016. The very best “national poll” available—the actual 2016 general election—gave Hillary Clinton a popular plurality of some two million votes. Yet she lost in the Electoral College.

As I outlined in my last post, the 2020 presidential election won’t be won or lost nationally. It’ll be won or lost in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and three smaller Democratic-leaning states.

Why is this so?

As has become cliché, the most salient political characteristic of the United States at this moment is its division. Our states have divided themselves into red ones loyal to Trump, as summarized in this spreadsheet, and blue states seeking anyone else, as summarized in this one. In every case, the states in the respective teams each went blue or red by five or more percentage points in 2016, with a single exception analyzed in this footnote.

Has the division decreased since 2016? Not hardly. It has only gotten worse. The populations in the most polarized states have sorted themselves into ideological silos, down to what they credit as “facts” and where they get their “news.” Pundit David Brooks accurately describes the process as voters acquiring a “sociological identity” as strong as their demographic one. The process makes it highly unlikely, if not impossible, for California or New York to vote for Trump in 2020, for example, or for North Dakota or South Carolina to vote for any Democrat.

The consequences of these facts for candidates are both good and bad. Neither general-election candidate need spend much time pressing the flesh in the hugely polarized states that his or her party owns. A well-managed media campaign, coupled with a very few appearances in key cities, ought to do the trick there.

The bad news is that each nominee, her or his staff, and the pollsters will have to learn to focus relentlessly on the seven decisive states summarized in this table. The good news is that it’ll be much easier for any Democratic nominee to offer a solid campaign of spectacle and entertainment to rival Trump’s own in those seven states than in the whole of our huge nation.

So the 2020 general election won’t turn on politics, policy or ideology, if only because wearing a red or blue jersey is far more important to most voters than what a candidate thinks or says. Most likely, the election will turn on campaign strategy and tactics.

With his Rhodes-Scholar’s mind, combat experience and business consulting at McKinsey, Pete Buttigieg seems to understand this brave new world better than other leading Democrats. Already he’s applied business people’s practical 80/20 Rule to bank his ground game and personal appearances on Iowa, the first and most important contest in the Democratic-primary marathon.

The big question is whether and when the other Democratic candidates and their teams will catch on. Those who can read the writing on the wall ought to be starting to soften up the seven crucial general-election states even now, during the primary campaign. Pundits and pollsters also ought to be focusing on those states in evaluating primary candidates, because they’re where the general-election battle will be won or lost. Chasing the illusion of a decisive national trend in a bitterly divided nation is a fool’s errand.

If Buttigieg wins the nomination, he’ll presumably continue doing much the same, going toe to toe with Donald Trump, in person and with spectacle, in all seven of the key decision-making states. It remains to be seen whether any other Dem has the stamina, flexibility, situational awareness, and rubber-meets-the-road sense to do as well, let alone any better. The very first executive test of a primary candidate with legislative but little or no executive experience is how well and how decisively she or he can run a primary campaign.

Like the lethal mock battles in the ancient Roman Coliseum, this general-election campaign will bear an eerie resemblance to war. Rallying and organizing the troops in the right battlegrounds will make the winner.

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