Why are We Going Unhinged?

“If the Democratic Party—the only party that still supports democratic values and at least tries to solve problems—can muster the discipline and the will, it can run in 2022 and 2024 on ending the stranglehold of unhinged, minority rule.”—Jennifer Rubin, “Our gun epidemic is a symptom of our broken democracy,” Washington Post, May 25, 2022.

I’ve read no better and more succinct description of what ails our democracy than Rubin’s column quoted above. It’s well worth a read. But it focuses on the “what,” not the “why.”

All by itself, the “what” is a catastrophe. A substantial fraction of American voters believes absolutely loopy things. Among them are that: (1) the last election was stolen, (2) there was massive electoral fraud in the widest and fairest casting of ballots in US history; (3) global warming is a hoax; (4) Covid-19 is not so bad, more like a mild flu; (5) the mRNA vaccines, although among the safest and most effective in medical history, are more dangerous than Covid-19; (6) those vaccines contain microchips to invade your privacy; (7) there is a conspiracy among left-leaning politicians to “import” people of color to “replace” non-Hispanic whites; (8) kindergartens and grammar schools are teaching kids critical race theory (a law-school subject) and “grooming” them for alternative sexual identities and (9) politicians want to take guns away from law-abiding people to impose greater control and destroy freedom.

Not every right-wing voter believes these things, and not even every radical right-winger believes all of them. But far too many individuals believe at least one or more to call our national society sane.

And I won’t even mention the conspiracy theories about Satanic pedophile rings or Jewish space lasers (for which there’s now even a sardonic shoulder patch). The notion that yet more guns, carried by yet more untrained people yet more freely and secretly, will somehow stem our rising tide of gun massacres, is just another in this long list of irrational beliefs tending toward Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

That’s the “what.”

Something seems to be driving Americans literally crazy, all at once. Could it be something like the lead in ancient Rome’s drinking water, which produced a succession of crazy emperors, including Nero, Caligula and Commodus? The Roman Emperors and elite drank water from lead pipes, while ordinary people drank water from clean concrete fountains. So Roman society decayed from the top. Here, in contrast, it seems to be decaying from the bottom, although far too many politicians foment and encourage the insanity. Maybe it’s a side effect of all those endocrine disruptors and other dicey plastics (BPA, PFAS, etc.) that we American produce and use far more than any other nation.

But one thing is sure: we can’t fix our epidemic of insanity until we know what’s causing it. Otherwise, we’ll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole with each new paranoid fantasy, denial of reality and conspiracy theory that comes up. So far, we have no reason to believe that the creativity and imagination of the human mind are failing, or that political operatives and PR mavens will somehow run out of false and crazy ideas.

So it’s about time to shift our focus from the “what” to the “why.” Why are so many people believing so many crazy things that just aren’t so, and why are our so-called “leaders” tolerating, encouraging and even fomenting the insanity? For a nation that rose to greatness as a global power by relying on practical thinking, science and technology, our current toleration for insanity hardly seems characteristic.

Chronology is not causation. But it may help to consider beginnings. When did things start to go south for us? If you think about it, you’ll probably come up with the same answer I did: a little over a decade ago.

In 2009, we had a new President named Obama. The nation breathed hope for positive change. In 2010, Obamacare became law, and millions more could see a doctor without financial distress. In May 2011, Obama sent a team of Navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11. That feat had eluded us for over eleven years, including both terms of George W. Bush as president.

So things seemed to be going pretty well as recently as ten years ago. They were going so well that, I speculated, Americans would start seeing Barack Obama as “One of Us,” despite his odd name, skin color, and Kenyan father.

Then something hit the fan. In short order, Republicans began scorched-Earth opposition to Obamacare, trying to repeal it (with nothing to replace it) over fifty times. The “birther” lie that Obama isn’t an American rose out of the cesspool of fringe politics. A lifelong grifter and showman named Donald Trump picked it up. Somehow, this same showman—with zero political experience and marked tendencies to lie, cheat and incite hate—became the next president of the United States.

Many of the very same working people who had voted for Obama voted for the showman. In short order came our new president’s love affairs with Putin and Kim, the biggest tax cuts for the rich in recent history, his attempt to extort a foreign leader (now the hero of Ukraine), his loss and refusal to accept it, the Big Lie that he really had won, the January 6 insurrection, and two impeachment trials that he did win. Now the Grand Old Party is in apparent thrall to a man who seems to value only personal fealty to himself as cult leader.

How did this all happen? How did the hopeful, practical, problem-solving America of only a decade or so ago decay into the sordid, irrational, superstitious mess we see today? I have a theory, so bear with me.

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee. A lot has been written about how wrong-headed, impractical and downright evil this decision was. But to my knowledge, few have touched the nub of the matter.

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” and so enjoy plenary rights under the First Amendment. It therefore stuck down statutory restrictions on how much money corporate businesses can donate to political campaigns.

But though corporations may be persons in the eyes of the law, they most definitely are not people. Corporations have no biological bodies, no consciences, no philosophies of life, no brains, no hearts, no blood, and no personalities. They are legal abstractions, except insofar as they reflect the will of their officers, directors and shareholders.

But therein lies the rub. Corporations exist for one purpose only: to make money for shareholders.

Early twentieth-century judges so ruled, and nothing in the interim has debunked that notion—at least not the feckless and unenforceable recent white paper of The Business Roundtable. If an officer or director of a corporation cannot make a profit, or cannot make as much of a profit as a rival, he or she will soon be out.

Profit is the prime directive of these “persons.” It’s the fundamental cause of virtually everything they do. So what’s the effect? What do corporate bosses actually do as they apply this prime directive, exploiting the Supreme-Court-given right to spend money on politics without limit?

First of all, bosses want to lower taxes. That’s practically a prime directive in itself, because taxes come directly out of corporate bottom lines.

Corporate bosses also want to reduce regulation. This do so no matter how socially, medically, and practically necessary or beneficial a regulation may be. Why? Because regulation costs money. It costs money to oppose regulatory proposals through lobbying and lawsuits. It costs money to comply with regulations once adopted. It costs money just to understand and apply the rules. Regulations invariably lower profits and distract management from its primary task: conceiving, making and selling goods and services for a profit.

So there you have it. Sometimes corporate bosses support political initiatives irrespective of profit, such as diversifying the workforce. Sometime they realize that government initiatives can make their business easier and increase its profit, as in the case of improved transportation infrastructure. But these are exceptions to the rule, often on the bosses’ personal initiatives. And they are ever subject to scrutiny from other officers, directors and shareholders for their impact on profit.

The routinely dismal fate of non-management shareholder initiatives at annual meetings tells the tale. Most die aborning. Why? Institutional investors hold most of the shares of public companies today, and they are interested in profit, not social progress or doing extraneous good. Often institutional shareholders don’t even care precisely what the firms whose stock they hold do, make or sell, as long as they make money.

How does this scenario corrupt and cheapen American politics? The answer is as simple as cause and effect. The prime corporate directives are to cut taxes and regulations, so any means to that end is fair game. Whatever pols can get people to believe, whatever fervor or hate they can incite, is unimportant, as long as the pols get elected and “represent the people” by voting to cut taxes and regulations. For corporations, so-called “small government” is not just something abstractly desirable, as it was to our King-obsessed Founders. It’s pretty much the whole ball game.

Take abortion, for example. For about four decades, Republicans have demagogued the issue to get “pro-lifers” on their side. While some corporate bosses may be evangelicals or Catholics and may act out of personal conviction, it’s now cliché that a dominant majority of our people supports abortion with sensible restrictions. There’s no reason to suppose that corporate bosses as a class are substantially different in their views.

So why do many big corporations support candidates who rabidly oppose abortion, when their officers and directors are, by and large, wealthier, better educated and more sophisticated than the average voter, and therefore less likely to view medical/social issues from a fundamentalist perspective? The answer is clear: they support rabid pro-life candidates if and as long as they toe the Republican line against taxes and regulation.

Gun control is similar. How many highly-educated, workaholic corporate bosses do you think are gun fanatics? How many do you think spend their rare free moments at the shooting range or hunting, as compared to golfing, watching professional sports, dining out, or going to concerts, theater, movies or the opera?

Someone should take a survey. But I’d be willing to wager that the average corporate CEO, CFO, COO or active director cares as much about the ability to own an automatic weapon or to carry a concealed weapon on the street as he or she does about critical race theory or Jewish space lasers. What does raise his or her professional interest intensely is any attempt to raise taxes or impose regulations that will adversely affect the business he or she devotes nearly every waking hour to.

So here’s how Citizens United actually works in practice. Corporate businesses make money by developing, making and selling goods and services to every one of us. They sell us everything from banking and insurance to iPhones, cars, trucks, travel and vacations.

All of this, in theory, has nothing to do with politics. But the amount of money corporations make is huge. According to our own Bureau of Economic Analysis, the grand total of US adjusted corporate profit for calendar year 2021 was $ 11.2 trillion. And that’s just from domestic industries, not their foreign manufacturing. It’s also profit, not revenue. So in theory every penny of it is available for bosses to spend on political candidates of their choice. By removing all government-imposed limits on political donations by corporations, Citizens United made around $11.2 trillion available annually for corporations to spend on politics.

Citizens United removed all external, government restraints on corporate giving to pols. But what internal restraints might there be? Suppose a corporate CEO proposed giving $ 1 million to a candidate or organization, for example, to restrict immigration or find a cure for cancer. Unless those initiatives had something to do with the corporation’s business, other officers, directors and shareholders would no doubt object. A shareholder “gadfly” might even introduce a resolution at the annual meeting to prohibit such an expenditure, and the resolution might pass because the expense would be outside the scope of the corporation’s operations. In contrast, a lobbying or political expense to reduce taxes or regulation is never outside the scope of the corporation's operations because, if successful, it would improve the corporation’s bottom line.

Thus Citizens United has one direct effect and two indirect ones. First, it directly encourages corporations, collectively, to spend what’s arguably the biggest single pot of money outside the US Treasury on political donations to cut taxes and regulation. Second, it indirectly discourages corporations from making similar expenses on anything else that doesn’t directly affect the corporation’s operations. Finally, Citizens United encourages corporate bosses to ignore how political leaders reach the goals of reducing taxes and regulations, as long as they get there.

Anyway, aren’t letting contractors and donees do things their own way part of the code of business people in general? The end result is to encourage pols and organizations, with real money, to drive voters crazy as long as they support “smaller government,” without regard to any deleterious effects on society, education or popular contact with reality.

The effect is the same for any nonsense or distraction that promotes lower taxes and less regulation, however crazy it may seem. Think that a man or woman running a multinational corporation doesn’t know that no one teaches critical race theory in grammar schools? that no teacher is “grooming” toddlers to become gay, bisexual, transexual, or “non-binary”? Think that these highly educated, international sophisticates are worried that people of color are going to replace the white race in America? when they often hire non-white people deliberately for the skills they have? Yet with their corporate campaign dollars, they support candidates who spew these lies and nonsense in service of their primary goals: cutting taxes and regulation.

What inspired this blog post was a WaPo article about Elise Stefanik, a New York Congresswoman. She’s also the third-ranking Republican in the House. Yet in her campaign advertisements, she reported invoked, if not endorsed, the “great replacement theory”—that Democrats and others are importing people of color to replace whites. After she did this, no less than twenty- two prestigious American corporations reportedly donated to her campaign through PACs.

The corporate donors included luminaries like UBS Americas, Price Waterhouse Coopers (accountants and consultants, for God’s sake), Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GAP, UPS, Federal Express, General Motors, Pfizer and Walgreens. The total amount they contributed to Stefanik was $144,000.

Think about that. According census projections, non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the US by 2045. So right now, they and the rest of us are nearing parity in numbers. If you wanted to undermine and weaken our nation and our people in a hurry, what better way than to turn two huge groups of roughly equal size against each other, based on nothing more than their identity. Divide and conquer: it’s a strategy as old as Caesar.

I’ll bet Putin wishes he’d thought of this first. Right now, he’s probably ordering his troll farms to work overtime to incite the “great replacement” dissension, with all hands on deck.

So why are a “who’s who” of great American corporations doing Putin’s work with their campaign contributions? Are they racists who subscribe to the “great replacement theory” just like denizens of the extreme white-supremacist fringe? Not hardly. They’re wealthy, highly-educated sophisticates at the top of their games and at the top of our American social order.

So why do they support this garbage? Apparently, they just don’t care. They may not even notice. All they care about is cutting taxes and regulations.

If a candidate supports that—as most, if not all, of Republicans do—the corporate bosses just don’t care what else he or she says or does to get elected. They’ll even support someone like Stefanik with one hand while, with the other, they give liberally to causes like racial justice, no doubt in part for the charitable deductions. (These very same corporations reportedly did just that.)

So there you have Citizens United in a nutshell. Our Supreme Court gave corporations unlimited rights of free speech like people. But they’re not people.

Real people care about a lot of things, including work, family, education, health, community, worship, social peace, and country. Corporations care only about profit. So as long as a pol is for cutting taxes and regulations, he or she can get corporate money by telling lies, fomenting hate, inciting insurrection, and making voters believe utter nonsense. If this is “leadership,” it’s the kind once ascribed to the Devil.

Of course the corporations who hand out the money have accomplices in our nation’s decline. Social media have made it far easier than ever before to promulgate lies, hate, disinformation and confusion. But social media themselves could not survive without the corporate and political advertising that is busy driving our people mad. They feed upon each other.

In all of the Supreme Court’s history, there is only one decision, in my view, with an equally catastrophic effect on our nation as a whole. It was Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). There the Court decided that a fugitive slave, as a Black man, had no rights under the American Constitution and so could be forced back into bondage, even from a “free” state.

That decision was catastrophic for innumerable reasons. At an abstract level, it contradicted our Founding credo (in our Declaration, not the Constitution), that “all men are created equal.” It undermined the Enlightenment’s notion of universal human rights on which our nation was Founded. But it also had a terrible practical effect: it made the Civil War inevitable.

By forcing Abolitionists in “free states” to return fugitive slaves or face punishment, it denied freedom not just to slaves themselves, but to everyone in so-called “free” states. After Dred Scott, nowhere in America could citizens act on slavery as their consciences bid. There was really no such thing as a “free” state. The “states rights” of slaveholding Southerners trumped both Northerners’ consciences and “free” states’ rights.

In effect, the slaveholding South had told the North and West: “our way of life will prevail, and you will help us maintain it, however abhorrent or immoral you may think it.” And the US Supreme Court had gone along. At that point, war was the only possible outcome; the South starting it was just a fluke of history.

Citizens United was and is similarly catastrophic, and it’s not easy to see a political way out. Amending the Constitution to restrain corporate influence on politics is politically impossible, and packing the Supreme Court or restricting its jurisdiction (as the Constitution permits) is only slightly less so.

Consumer boycotts may have their place, but their scope is limited. Take a look at the list of corporate sponsors of Stefanik in the WaPo piece. High on the list are a huge bank, a multinational accounting firm, an Internet-entertainment conglomerate, a multinational tobacco company, General Motors, and two big delivery services (UPS and Federal Express).

As I look at this list of twenty-two corporations that supported Stefanik’s campaign, I see only one that I patronize directly: Home Depot. I use UPS and Federal Express indirectly when firms like Amazon send me things, but I don’t usually have any control over the delivery service. Anyway, is DHL an alternative? My wife gets her Internet from Comcast, but what’s the alternative? We switched from AT&T because it was much worse in her area, basically dysfunctional.

So what could I do? I could cut up my Home Depot credit card, send the pieces by registered mail to Home Depot’s CEO, and explain why I plan henceforth to buy my home improvement supplies from Lowe’s, Amazon, or the few local hardware stores that support my community. I could close my letter with a ringing sentence: “At the end of the day, I’d rather fail to improve my home than destroy my country, as your political contributions are helping to do.”

But the best, most eloquent letter from a single customer would have little effect. The only thing that might motivate change is an organized boycott. And that would have to come from people with experience and skill in organizing. I have none.

The crux of the matter is that corporations are replacing government, worldwide, as the source of goods, services and the benefits of life, and therefore of economic power. I have written on this general topic here (on the upside) and here (on the downside). The saving grace of “corporate rule” is that corporations have to take people’s real needs into account when they sell their goods and services. When they make political contributions, they don’t have to, and they generally don’t.

That was the fatal flaw of Citizens United, and it may yet destroy our democracy. The only antidotes that I can see now are collective action by citizens, customers, unionized employees, and political activists and reporters who expose corporate support for extremists, nihilists and haters.


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.

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A Message to those Under Thirty

“Hate your next-door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace.” — Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction” (1965)

Are you fearful? distraught? worried about your future?

You have a lot to worry about. The pandemic is still with us, notwithstanding the pollyannas. Inflation is high, along with student debt. Putin’s atrocious war in Ukraine might escalate. And global warming may already have reached a tipping point, inexorably increasing due to “natural” methane release, no matter how quickly we stop burning fossil fuels.

Worst of all, social relations here at home are rotting like a deer carcass in the forest. That makes everything worse. It immobilizes us.

We’ve already suffered 198 mass shootings in 2022, and the year is only nineteen weeks old. Worse yet, our Congress and many state governments can’t seem to agree on anything besides suppressing votes and women’s reproductive rights. Congress refuses to grant the money that our doctors say we absolutely need to fight the pandemic, future variants and future plagues.

Is this outbreak of hate and dissension just another random plague, like the Covid pandemic and SARS before it? Not hardly. It’s an evil deliberately foisted upon us by political demagogues and media “personalities” for personal gain, wealth, notoriety, and political power. To see how it works at its worst, read Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column yesterday.

Think about that. With all that’s going wrong at home and abroad, some are purposely fomenting hate among us for money, fame, and political gain.

The worst of the worst is Fox’ Tucker Carlson. He regularly peddles so-called “replacement” theory—the notion that pols are “importing” immigrants of color and Jews to “replace” white Christians.

For about a decade, demographers have predicted that the US will become a white-minority nation by around 2045. So the US Census has predicted. It’s not quite as inevitable as the motion of the planets, but it’s a natural process of diversification and diverging birth rates.

But Carlson and his ilk, including many politicians, are using this more-or-less inexorable demographic phenomenon to put Americans at each other’s throats. That makes flat-Earthers look sensible.

If Vladimir Putin and his spooks did this, we would consider it an act of cyberwar. But our own are doing it, for their own selfish reasons. Treason? You decide. But it’s certainly not helpful. It makes literally everything worse, because it makes all of politics personal.

So what can you do to fight back? Two things. First, figure out who’s most at fault.

As the great humorist Will Rogers once said, “Not all Democrats are horse thieves, but all horse thieves are certainly Democrats.” In this case, not all Republicans are replacement-theory racist demagogues, but all replacement-theory racist demagogues are certainly Republicans. Just watch and note how many Republicans “go with the flow” and refuse to call them out. Worse yet, watch how many consort with them, coddle them, laud them, and use them.

So now we come to the second thing. One party—and it alone—is going all in on hate, putting us at each other’s throats. However twisted its moral reasoning, it thinks it has something to gain. So do the moneybags who support this abomination.

So what can you do? Easy. You can spend a few hours finding out how to register and vote. You can avoid long lines, if your state allows, by voting early or by mail.

Then you can vote. Vote for every Democrat and against every Republican. Vote for every office. Leave no vote uncast. Get your friends, siblings and everyone you know to do the same. Do this knowing that Republicans are willfully ripping our nation apart, or coddling and encouraging those that do.

Voters like you, who don’t always vote, can pull off a vast repudiation of Republicans at the polls. You can do this in a midterm election that everyone now thinks the Republicans will win.

If you can pull that off, the ripping apart will stop cold. That may be the only way to stop it.

So make time in your busy lives to register and vote. Do so as if your life depends on it. The quality of the rest of your life surely does, as does the survival of our democracy. And you just might feel safer the next time you walk into a market, school or house of worship.

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.

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The Great Winding Down: De-Globalizing

The urge to embrace glittering abstractions is boundless. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx saw how ruthlessly capitalism exploited and oppressed workers. So he proposed a simple reversal of fortune: put workers on top. Forget about unions and collective bargaining. Declare a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

But what does that even mean? From ancient Rome (where the word originated) to the present day, a “dictator” is a single individual. Yet whole point of the misery of labor is that workers in their millions are the many, and owners and oligarchs, who control their fates, are the few. So how do you make a “dictatorship of the proletariat”? You create and empower someone like Stalin. Communism was a logical conundrum that, just like a too-successful dog, ate its own tail.

Globalization is another one of those seductive abstractions that, on close examination, doesn’t make a lot of sense. The bare abstract theory had a certain glitter. Let people who are good at making something, or who live near the needed raw materials, produce that thing. They have a “comparative advantage” and will be more efficient than others. Everybody will be better off.

But is that so? Where do the people in the rest of the world get the money to pay for that thing? What do they sell in return? And what about the workers who used to compete with the ones with the “comparative advantage”? Do they go back to farming, or subsist as hunter-gatherers? If so, how can they become a “market” for the goods they no longer make? Or do they revolt and become Yellow Jackets in France or MAGA insurrectionists in the US?

When you start thinking practically, in terms of cause and effect, seductive attractions fall apart. That’s precisely what the US’ economy and politics did after the US sold most of its factories and skilled jobs to China. We are now living the dismal aftermath: we no longer even make most of the things we need to stay healthy and enjoy modern life.

And as for efficiency, is it really “efficient” for Britons and Americans to eat New Zealand lamb? In the early seventies, when I was a science fellow at Cambridge (UK), there were sheep on the “backs” of its great medieval-origin colleges. Why were they there? They kept the grass trimmed naturally and provided wool and food.

When I visited Cambridge again thirty years later, fossil-fueled machine mowers had replaced the sheep, and Britons were eating New Zealand lamb. Did shipping all those sheep, or their refrigerated meat, halfway around the globe make society more “efficient”? And what about the contribution to our carbon burden of global warming made by that shipping and by the mowing machines, not to mention the cost of making and maintaining them?

But enough of how simplistic, self-contradictory and ultimately silly the glittering abstraction of “comparative advantage” has been. Let’s look at five specific reasons why globalization is coughing up blood on its deathbed right now, today.

1. Displacing Skilled Workers. Despite all his umbrage at their oppression, Marx had made a fatal error regarding workers. He didn’t think of them as people. Instead, he thought of them as an abstraction, the “proletariat.” So he couldn’t even imagine how they might be misled, divided, and exploited by the very people who ostensibly set out to help them. In the end, those people became their dictatorial oppressors and sent workers who stood up for themselves to the gulags.

Capitalists made a similar error. Their goal was “efficiency” of production, that is “efficiency” in using the “factors of production,” namely land, labor and capital.

But they ignored a crucial difference among the three: land and capital are inanimate. When you despoil land, it does nothing but rot. When you waste money, it’s just gone. But when you oppresses people and make them suffer, they revolt. They may not do it intelligently or “efficiently,” but they rebel. In so doing they can change society forever. Just ask the French. Or the Russians. Or Americans now living under the Demagogue’s long shadow.

And so when American capitalists—our own oligarchs—sold most of our factories and jobs overseas just to lower labor costs, our displaced skilled workers rebelled. It took them two generations, from the eighties until now. But however slowly, they eventually came to see that the solid middle-class lives that they had had and had hoped for their children were vanishing, and that there was (and is) no easy way back. So they put on their MAGA hats, suspended their better judgment, and put a self-obsessed showman and grifter, untroubled by experience or morality, into the White House. They did so just because he claimed to have their backs.

We are still dealing with the consequences of American workers’ belated understanding of a dismal truth: our oligarchs sold their jobs and good middle-class lives overseas for the benefit of the oligarchs themselves and their shareholders. (The abstract theories of comparative advantage and free trade were just convenient excuses.) They got rich, and their Chinese factories came to dominate global commerce. But workers’ communities in developed nations were destroyed, and their children are left without the secure future that their own parents had had.

If you don’t see this still as a powder keg about to explode, then you might want to review history. At the turn of the last century, Germany (along with England) held the heights of human culture, in music (Bach, Brahms and Beethoven), literature (Göthe, Heine, and Schiller), and science and math (Einstein, Euler, Gauss, Planck, Schrödinger and Von Hemholz). A mere three decades later, Nazis were goose-stepping on the parade grounds of Nuremberg.

What made the difference? A huge reversal of fortune, culminating in the Weimar Inflation—the worst a developed nation has ever experienced. Both had resulted primarily from the Allies’ vindictive terms of peace and demands for reparations at the end of the First World War.

And don’t think for a moment that today’s rebellion is confined to the US. It’s also behind the disorder of the Yellow Jackets in France, Marine Le Pen’s recent close approach to the French Presidency, and Britain’s uncharacteristic Brexit. How else could a nation that once had a trading empire on which the Sun never set turn its economic back on its closest neighbors? How else could it do so after helping forge an Enlightenment-based alliance with a whole continent after centuries of war? These very questions suggest the depth of the angst of the skilled workers who once had made Britain great.

2. Supply-chain problems. Today “supply-chain problems” have become cliché. The vast chain of global supply of physical goods, parts, raw materials and subassemblies is breaking down. The Covid-19 pandemic is the most immediate cause, but the effect has been a long time coming.

The basic problem is again the glittering abstraction of “efficiency.” Raw materials, parts and subassemblies generally cost less where labor is cheaper, so we make this stuff where workers are paid less and have fewer rights. We don’t worry much about geography, shipping cost, labor troubles (let alone rebellion), local pollution, local disasters, crime, political instability, or anything so unlikely as a tsunami or a pandemic.

Not only that. Since inventory costs money to store and maintain (purchase loans bear interest), we cajole business to minimize its inventory. We urge it to use the same “just in time” system for manufacturing that the Japanese invented. Don’t consider for a moment that the Japanese have a geographically small country and one of the most ethnically homogenous, orderly and mutually respectful societies on Earth. Can’t anyone, anywhere emulate their methods, regardless of political instability or distance?

The Fukushima nuclear disaster, provoked by a tsunami, might have been a tiny signal that, as the Bible says, “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Japan and Germany—two societies best known for the quality and ingenuity of their engineering—started shutting their down their nuclear power plants, without much of a plan for replacing their carbon-free “baseload” power. But otherwise, the “efficient” program of just-in-time, globally intricate supply chains went marching on, like a herd of lemmings, toward the cliff.

The pandemic was the cliff. Car production in the US and Europe shut down for want of computer chips from factories in Taiwan. Groceries, toilet paper and made-in-China masks and other PPE to fight the pandemic began disappearing, sporadically and unpredictably, from store shelves.

Just recently, Viking Cruises informed my wife and me that a near-polar cruise we had signed up for two years ago was being canceled. Not just postponed. Canceled. The reason: the brand new ship for the cruise would not be ready in time, or on any reliable schedule. What parts or systems the “efficient” global supply chain failed to provide on time Viking didn’t say.

When you design an intricate global manufacturing system bent on squeezing the last penny out of every part and every step, without much thought to the myriad real natural, human and engineering risks factors, you have a disaster waiting to happen. That’s what our much-vaunted “just in time” and “efficient” global supply chain has become and still is: a disaster in the making. Now that the pandemic has shown how vulnerable the whole system is to leakage, leaks are growing like gaps in a rusted-out hull.

No one should consider the cancellation of a luxury cruise a catastrophe (except perhaps the putative ship’s crew.) The plight of the millions who will go hungry or starve for want of food and fertilizer from a now-embattled Ukraine won’t be so easy to laugh off.

3. Culture and Politics. And so we come to what may ultimately may give the coup de grace to globalization: people. The seductive abstractions underlying our minutely globalized supply chain fail to take them into account. Not only are the workers people, and thus prone to rebelling when neglected or mistreated. The workers, their managers and the oligarchs who control them live and operate within the context of local and regional laws, societies and cultures.

Sometimes those cultures believe strange things. Sometimes they do disastrous and self-destructive things. Sometime they start wars for nothing more than delusions in a dictator’s head.

Then politics, writ both small and large, comes into play. Show us all where the mechanistic theory of “efficiency” in global supply chains takes politics into account, and you might get a Nobel Prize. You might get the same kind of Nobel Prize that Daniel Kahneman got (and his colleague Amos Tversky should have shared, but missed by dying too soon). These two Israeli thinkers first debunked the absurd notion that people reliably act rationally in economic matters.

In the social sciences, Kahneman and Tversky were much like Galileo and Copernicus in astronomy. Those two showed us that, despite our species’ enormous self-regard, our little blue planet is not in fact the center of the Universe.

How does politics come into play in supply chains? Let me count the ways. Sometimes you want your own nation’s people, and not anyone else’s, to have the good jobs and good pay that come from skilled manufacturing. That desire seemed to have faded out along with nineteenth-century mercantilism as an economic theory. But today it’s coming back into vogue with a vengeance.

Sometimes you want to have manufacturing onshore—on your shore—because manufacturing skill produces better, stronger and more accurate weapons. You might want to have not only those weapons, but their essential components (like semiconductor chips) under your control. This is already a big factor in the War in Ukraine, as Russians discover how many parts that they need for advanced weaponry are made offshore, and Americans consider how may weapons parts Russia or China might some day use against them.

Sometimes differences in culture can cause supply problems through a multi-step chain of causation. Take China, for example. Today it’s the world’s factory. Yet it also has a unique, culturally based way of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s home-made vaccines are not as good as the US’ and Europe’s mRNA vaccines, so China doesn’t rely on vaccines alone. It also relies on draconian city-wide and province-wide lockdowns. It has from the very beginning of the crisis, in Wuhan and Hubei.

This peculiar (to China) approach has two principal consequences. The first is obvious: when a whole city locks down to keep the virus from spreading, manufacturing there slows down and begins to halt. So can manufacturing anywhere in the world, if it depends on unique products or promised supply from a locked-down city. Right now, that has been the principal effect of the pandemic on long supply chains.

The secondary effect of Chinese lockdowns is less obvious. To the extent the lockdowns are effective in protecting the vast majority of Chinese from exposure to the virus, they produce a Chinese population that has little natural or acquired immunity to it. To the extent the Chinese vaccine is less effective than those in the West, this lack of natural immunity becomes more pronounced. As a result, supply chains from China will become even more vulnerable with every new mutation of the virus, as long as the pandemic lasts.

A tertiary effect is more political. As Chinese supply chains slow down, and as the Chinese deficit in immunity to a pandemic becomes more apparent, Chinese people will be more reluctant to deal with outsiders and to travel, consult and cooperate with them, especially inside China. In other words, cultural differences in pandemic response, which themselves have cultural roots, will reinforce China’s cultural and trade isolation, totally apart from geopolitical and cultural forces that push in the same direction. Among the net results will be supply chains that are more likely to break under stress, and therefore are less reliable.

4. Legal and governmental stress. Part of the problem of neglecting the role of people is neglecting how they govern themselves. Not only do people around the world have different cultures. They also have different laws and governments. In these matters, too, people often behave in different and unpredictable ways.

A classic example is Russia’s current push to use its supply of fossil fuels, on which Europe relies, to coerce Europe into accepting Putin’s atrocity-ridden invasion of Ukraine. Parts of Europe now must contemplate the dim prospects of six months without adequate heating, lighting or industrial energy, just to uphold principles of national sovereignty and basic human decency. Then there’s the even dimmer prospect of an aggressive nuclear power led by a deranged dictator putting troops and weapons right up to Europe’s border. So the abstract notion of comparative advantage doesn’t look so glittering now, does it?

Sure, by virtue of propinquity and the nature of its underground oil and gas pools, Russia may have a comparative advantage in serving Europe with oil and gas. It may even be the most “efficient” supplier. But very “rational” leaders, including those in once-pacifist Germany, are working hard, even letting their people suffer, to export billions in weapons and supply, just in order to give their neighbors in Ukraine “comparative advantages” that have little to do with classical free-market economics.

If you were to name the most promising fields of science and technology now under development, you would probably include genomic medicine, quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. Each of them has enormous prospects for commerce, trade and industry.

But each also has enormous implications for national security. A nation that can fend off a pandemic better than others has an obvious advantage in staying strong. Quantum computing offers incomparable advantages in computing scope and speed, allowing its masters to break others’ security codes and deny them secrets and privacy. Robotics promises tireless factory workers and fearless, pain-immune soldiers. And AI offers advantages in everything from manufacturing, through population surveillance, to better and even autonomous weapons.

So the hypothetical “rational economic actors,” who base their buying and selling decisions only on quality and price, exist only in the minds of economists. They are fictions of abstract imagination. Real people operate, much of the time, on the basis of national, religious, ethnic, linguistic, sexual and personal chauvinism.

As nationalism, racism, and religious and other intolerance increase—under the stress of population pressure, global warming and political demagoguery—these factors will increasingly dictate decisions on making, selling, hoarding and saving natural resources and manufactured products that use them. They can become as important everywhere as avoiding Russian oil and gas are in Europe and the Western world right now.

5. Global Warming. Global warming likely has already reached a “tipping point.” Further warming may be baked in, regardless of how well or how poorly humanity reduces its CO₂ emissions.

The reasons are three: methane release from (1) melting permafrost and (2) dissociating deep-sea methane hydrates, and (3) the loss of an immense heat sink when most or all of the ice in our glaciers and at our poles melts. (Readers who paid attention in high-school physics know that the latent heat of melting a cubic centimeter of water—80 calories—is enough to raise the temperature of that same cubic centimeter of water, once melted, to 80 degrees centigrade, or 176 degrees Fahrenheit, i.e., 83% of the way to the boiling point of water.)

These three effects all operate independently of future emissions of CO₂. They make it likely, although perhaps not inevitable, that major parts of the globe, beginning with equatorial lands and the tropics, will become uninhabitable to humanity by the end of this century. How will that affect supply chains and commerce? Likely severely.

The globe’s division into habitable and uninhabitable zones will provoke mass migrations of refugees. Those migrations will make the current exodus from war-torn Ukraine look like a grammar-school field trip.

In fact, some experts already consider the current exodus of migrants from Syria, the African Sahel, and Central America to be partly motivated by drought- and/or flood-caused failures of agriculture. The displacement resulting from runaway warming, with all the stress, resistance (in safer areas), hostility and wars that result, will further motivate people to make goods, including food, nearer where they are used or consumed.

* * *
At the end of the day, the so-called “science” of economics is not merely dismal, as John Maynard Keynes once described it. In its innate coddling of Mankind’s enormous self-regard, it’s about where astronomy was just after the discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo. It’s still mired in mechanistic abstractions, based on a non-existent rational humanity, which bear little resemblance to reality. Our actual reality is a planet overpopulated with seven billion people who can, and often do, act irrationally. They foul their own nests, destroy each others’ lives wantonly, and generally act against their own long-term interests.

It was comparatively easy to shift from an Earth-centric view of the Universe to a Heliocentric view of the solar system. Why? Nothing real in self-seeking human life (except humanity’s collective ego) turned on the shift. Yet even so, Galileo found himself nearly excommunicated and executed for daring to recommend the shift.

In economics, we are just beginning to emerge from the self-delusion that: (1) we all act rationally in business and trade; and (2) we can build a global economic system based on rational self-interest in a world of nationalism, national politics, geopolitics, and religious, ethnic and racial chauvinism, not to mention pandemics and global warming exacerbating all of the above. So far, our conception of economics and “free trade” has virtually ignored the human element and a number of known (and recently experienced) risk factors.

Kahneman’s and Tversky’s insights have hinted at how hard it is and will be just to fight global warming. A recent Frontline series drives home how hard. It shows how successful a mere two self-interested corporations (Exxon the Koch Brothers’) have been in delaying serious US effort to address climate change for decades.

We haven’t even begun to apply similar insights to deal effectively with pandemics and different cultures’ responses to them. We haven’t begun to deal rationally with carbon-free nuclear power, or how best to use it to curtail runaway global warming. We are just starting to formulate a plan to deal with a Russia led by a fanatical new tsar who seeks to dominate his neighborhood by controlling the remaining supply of the fossil fuels as they run out and the world looks for better alternatives.

At this point, only two things are clear. First, the deeply engrained notion that free global trade makes everybody better off is as wrong on as many levels as the notion of our little blue planet at the center of the Universe. But unlike that bit of ancient, erroneous self-regard, the global-trade-as-panacea nonsense could help cause the partial or complete self-extinction of our species.

Second, we don’t have the time or data to develop a holistic alternative theory that works. At least we don’t have time to stave off a collapse in public health, the global economy, and global climate or an even more devastating war that might go nuclear.

Instead, each society—and perhaps each locality—is going to have to look to its own advantage and risk factors and do the best for its people. Each will have to avoid all-encompassing, abstract economic theories as the intellectual snake oil they are.

The best we Americans (or anyone else) can do is to work with others to secure mutual advantage that lasts beyond the short term. Where that is not possible, we must protect our own interests, our own workers and our own economic goals. In all this, practical cause-and-effect reasoning, not abstract theory, should be our guide.

This does not mean that we should become yet more selfish. The wider the scope of mutual advantage, the better. But it does mean that we should stop ignoring practical consequences of our actions, like the easily foreseeable results of selling most of our factories to China, or the failure to do anything about global warming in the vain hope that others will act first. Leadership is not an abstract theory: it’s a real facet of individual and national character.

But we must put seductive, unproven, abstract theory aside, at least for a decade or two. We must let practical politicians—NOT demagogues—do their thing. If doing so helps avoid the disastrous practical effects of abstract theories like Communism, just-in-time globalism, and our half-century-long (and ongoing) neglect of real workers’ interests, our entire species will have been blessed.


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